Christopher Clugston's book 'Blip: Humanity's 300 year self-terminating experiment with industrialism,' published in 2019, is an update of his book 'Scarcity: Humanity's Final Chapter (2012).
The Epilogue in 'Blip' relates Clugston's communications with Walter Youngquist over the last five of Walter's ninety-seven years.
Walter was relatively optimistic in his view that industrial civilization could make it to 2100, whereas Christopher puts his stake in the ground at 2050, with the caveat that the 2030's and 2040's will take us places that are unthinkable.
William R. Catton Jr., author of 'Overshoot' in 1982, wrote in the introduction to 'Scarcity,'
"Chris Clugston has pulled together such an array of facts about the path ravenous humanity has trod and the consequences we now confront that no person who fails to read this book should be eligible for election to high office."
The Epilog to 'Blip' ends with:
"Our other recurring topic was how fortunate we both felt to have lived during humanity's industrial era, and how we felt especially fortunate to to have experienced industrial humanity's heyday - the period between the end of WW2 and the oil shocks of the 1970's. Times were never better - literally - especially for those of us who lived in the West. After lamenting the fact that the human generation coming of age today will never experience the reality with which his (greatest) generation and my (baby boomer) generation grew up .... Walter would typically sum up our good fortune in having experienced the best of industrial humanity's 300 year 'blip' by signing off with "It's been a great ride!"
CA policy, not political party, is driving EV adoption. Triple whammy of generous income tax credits, insanely high gas prices and extra perks such as use of car pool lanes distort the market.
I’m surprised a company hasn’t swooped in to make small affordable EVs with low ranges for local use. A neighbor has a vehicle that was briefly made in the early 2000s that went out of business but he still uses it. I’d buy one if it was in business. The majority of Americans live in metro areas and the majority of drives are shortish commutes. Lots of people are buying e bikes for this reason. But if a Tesla that has wayyyyy too much tech goes for $40k it stands to reason that a very simple small battery vehicle could go for under $10k, use 1/5 of the battery minerals and actually save families money by allowing them to replace one of their gas cars with something cheaper. Personally I’d love a car with zero tech, just a golf cart with some windows that gets me across town. It’s odd no company is trying to fill this. It’s either a $2k e-bike or a $40k+ supercharged iPhone on wheels. I don’t need a 10 second quarter mile to go to the grocery store.
Aren't alot of the short, around town trips done to pick up stuff (groceries, home project things, etc etc) and bring it back home, not just to transport a person or persons to a destination? What's the cargo capacity of a golf cart-sized EV?
Golf-cart-like small cars that cannot exceed 35mph do not require most of the NTSA stuff. But neighborhood only is a little too restricted unfortunately.
Can't the Fed simply print electricity and wires and transformers and pylons and robots to assemble it all and computers to run it all? Maybe Jared Bernstein (or other Bidenenomics geniuses) can figure it all out, since to him (them) the who and why money is printed and what is the relationship between printing and to the bond and general markets seems too complex.
It’s always interesting to see how figures are used to support a belief. The author’s bias is clear throughout.
No talk of how petro companies shut down early EV attempts, then claims EVs have been available for 100 years with insignificant success. No talk of how Tesla’s vehicles are out of reach of most people. No talk of the rapidly lowering prices of EVs.
Perhaps better to use a comparison date of less than ten years to analyse the success of the international EV market. The USA seems to have structural issues in purchasing from China but the rest of the world is rapidly increasing their EV purchases.
I have an Ebike that rules! In the end it takes 8hrs to charge and you get 2hrs of ride time. That is 2hrs of moving under power. So, for fun it's great. For business...... it can't compete with an IC engine. I see no way for an electric WORK VEHICLE to replace a diesel truck.
How did "petro companies shut down early EV attempts" that's a myth and even today the current low number of EV's are no threat to oil companies. How does an petro company shutdown a startup and who were they? EV's have been around for 100 years with insignificant success - how is this false? The major problem with EV's are the batteries and even after 100 years of development they are still very low energy density devices and maybe solid state batteries will help but they are still 10+ years off. It took Li-ion more than 20 years to go from lab to mass production.
EV purchases in the EU have also hit a wall since the early adopters have bought them already and the rest of us do not want to compromise on range, refueling, towing, etc. and what do you do when your battery loses too much range due to age. The average age of vehicle on the road is 12 years and a 12 year old EV will have lost almost 25% of its original range this does not happen with an ICE vehicle.
Mass adoption of EV's are still in the future and really will not arrive until a new battery technology enters mass production that is well beyond the limited energy density of Li-Ion's. I suspect by 2040 most of us will be driving some sort of hybrid EV+ICE vehicle but it will not be fully electric for a multitude of reasons.
I stand corrected on petro company interference with EV companies early last century. The technology just wasn’t sufficient early last century. However, petro companies are highly active today in making it hard for EVs. Their financial model is under threat with the world having agreed to zero net carbon emissions by 2050.
Mass adoption of EVs and batteries is already here but surely will increase as technologies are improved.
Chinese car brands are missing from the US market. That is one reason why it appears that EVs will not penetrate much of the market. China is pushing the world forward with their EV production and competition. However in the US 2023 EVs increased by 40% on 2022 numbers. World wide sales continue to increase rapidly but not exponentially. In contrast with the U.S. and EU, Norway is not imposing tariffs on electric cars imported from China. Government policy is key in encouraging the uptake of new low carbon technology. Norway is near 100% EVs. Petrol and diesel engine cars in Norway are “pretty much taxed so much that they're getting less and less interesting to buy." Carbon emissions and climate change is the driving force behind all of this.
I was in Durham, NC recently, where I saw one of these Cybertrucks ahead of me in traffic. Yep, it was every bit as "butt-ugly" as it is in the above photo. My personal wish for all this climate fraud is that the EV industry will lead the way in total and painful crashes of the wind / solar / EV industries. Without EVs to drive a need for "clean electric generation", lots of the arguments (real or imaginary) for wind & solar will also disappear. And remember, a true disruptor like Donald Trump might be all that's necessary to start the crashes of these Democrat / government-caused disasters, and a return to fossil fuels- with a resurrection of our nuclear industry around small modular reactors.
LOL, I also recently saw the butt ugly Cyber Truck on the road it truly is a crowning jewel of bad design. I suspect in a few years people will be almost giving these away.
Don't despair, Mayor Pete is working on it and has already built 8 new charging stations since the IRA was passed 2 years ago and at that rate we can have chargers all over the country by the year 20,024.
Not optimistic, stupid. At least to any remotely informed, rational human being, even at the time. I assume he’s still on the prognostication circuit getting paid a lot to talk shite to gullible liberals.
As far as chart 8 , the Green Goo is the centerpiece to China's bribery of Biden (and about 1000 or more other actors entrusted by the public who have done nothing more but sold that trust to the highest Chinese bidder )
The TESLA TRUCK is designed to meet the needs of the para military militias that are preparing for the Civil War here in the USA … ever wonder why they made the truck bulletproof???
It's not bulletproof. It just looks like it. Like the British Quad artillery tractor of WWII. Which raises the question, "If it isn't bulletproof, why is it so ugly?" Also another question, "How much can it haul, compared to a Ford F-150? Weight and cargo box size, width and length?"
The problem with this analysis is it ignores the highly likely near-term revolution in battery technologies -- which promises to make batteries (40% of the cost of EVs) cheaper, faster charging, more durable (more recharges), better in cold weather, more energy dense (making them lighter and offering better range) and most of all -- cheaper. There are many candidates (in chemistry and format) and how many of them will succeed -- if ever -- is unknown, except for the likelihood some will succeed. Sodium-ion batteries are already real, with continuing progress on lithium-sulfur and others. Once cheap long range EVs arrive, the days of traditional gasoline cars is over. Adoptions curves tend to be slow, slow, slow... then overnight. Remember film cameras? Replaced by digital cameras, and now largely replaced by phones. The triumph of EVs may be more swift.
Scientists and battery experts, who have been optimistic in the recent past about improving lithium-ion batteries and about developing new battery chemistries—lithium/air and lithium/sulfur are the leading candidates—are considerably less optimistic now. Improvement in energy storage density of lithium-ion batteries has been only incremental for the past decade. A large-scale research consortium (the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research) has been created with an ambitious goal of improving energy storage density by a factor of five and reducing cost by a factor of five in 5 years. This can only happen if there is a terrific, wonderful, and amazing breakthrough in battery technology.
Interesting, thanks! You are clearly a fellow that knows things. But improvement by a factor of 5 ought not to be needed for mass adoption -- since EVs are (arguably, if there was a charging infrastructure) practical now. I realize "better" has many elements (density, speed of charging, repeatability of charging, safety, utility in winter, cost to buy, cost to recycle, affect on environment) but even a 50% improvement on some of those might be enough. Heck, if batteries were no better than current ones but 50% cheaper to buy might be enough. And don't Sodium-Ion batteries already do that? And on sale now in China in $19,000 EVs.
Show me when those revolutionary batteries are built and successfully in use EVs. Until then, I want to keep my taxes. Don’t worry, if anything that fabulous comes along the inventor and mfgr will get very rich.
But I’ll still object to the transportation system being subject to risks of loss of the grid.
Thanks, Robert. I point folks to your work because you put so much into objective analysis and presentation of the energy issues.
Coming out of a nuclear power life, besides the large stack of issues addressed (and even my constant chant of “don’t use electricity to make heat” - just for 2nd Law of Thermodynamics reasons), I also lived in risk analysis world.
From this, I note that shifting our transportation systems’ energy source from petroleum to electricity pushes the consequences of disturbances in the electric grid to also disrupt the transportation of people and goods, and it does this for illusory benefits. Whereas leaving their energy sources separate maintains good immunity for transportation. The electric grid has many potential modes of disruption. I wouldn’t want to drive transportation into taking on those vulnerabilities unless the benefits were very large and low cost and they are neither. We don’t need to lose everything from a power outage.
We have a large, mature fuel distribution system for petroleum. BTW: there’s a simple answer to any response that says that gas pumps need electricity. I can bring my portable generator over to power their pump.
I don’t understand why Musk focused resources on the stupid Cybertruck instead of a $25,000 small suv or sedan which would have been an instant winner.
This is not about EVs, it’s about control of the populace by the WEF. Orwell’s World is here and now.
Thanks Robert, great read.
Christopher Clugston's book 'Blip: Humanity's 300 year self-terminating experiment with industrialism,' published in 2019, is an update of his book 'Scarcity: Humanity's Final Chapter (2012).
The Epilogue in 'Blip' relates Clugston's communications with Walter Youngquist over the last five of Walter's ninety-seven years.
Walter was relatively optimistic in his view that industrial civilization could make it to 2100, whereas Christopher puts his stake in the ground at 2050, with the caveat that the 2030's and 2040's will take us places that are unthinkable.
William R. Catton Jr., author of 'Overshoot' in 1982, wrote in the introduction to 'Scarcity,'
"Chris Clugston has pulled together such an array of facts about the path ravenous humanity has trod and the consequences we now confront that no person who fails to read this book should be eligible for election to high office."
The Epilog to 'Blip' ends with:
"Our other recurring topic was how fortunate we both felt to have lived during humanity's industrial era, and how we felt especially fortunate to to have experienced industrial humanity's heyday - the period between the end of WW2 and the oil shocks of the 1970's. Times were never better - literally - especially for those of us who lived in the West. After lamenting the fact that the human generation coming of age today will never experience the reality with which his (greatest) generation and my (baby boomer) generation grew up .... Walter would typically sum up our good fortune in having experienced the best of industrial humanity's 300 year 'blip' by signing off with "It's been a great ride!"
CA policy, not political party, is driving EV adoption. Triple whammy of generous income tax credits, insanely high gas prices and extra perks such as use of car pool lanes distort the market.
I’m surprised a company hasn’t swooped in to make small affordable EVs with low ranges for local use. A neighbor has a vehicle that was briefly made in the early 2000s that went out of business but he still uses it. I’d buy one if it was in business. The majority of Americans live in metro areas and the majority of drives are shortish commutes. Lots of people are buying e bikes for this reason. But if a Tesla that has wayyyyy too much tech goes for $40k it stands to reason that a very simple small battery vehicle could go for under $10k, use 1/5 of the battery minerals and actually save families money by allowing them to replace one of their gas cars with something cheaper. Personally I’d love a car with zero tech, just a golf cart with some windows that gets me across town. It’s odd no company is trying to fill this. It’s either a $2k e-bike or a $40k+ supercharged iPhone on wheels. I don’t need a 10 second quarter mile to go to the grocery store.
Aren't alot of the short, around town trips done to pick up stuff (groceries, home project things, etc etc) and bring it back home, not just to transport a person or persons to a destination? What's the cargo capacity of a golf cart-sized EV?
In India or Florida?
A $10k vehicle would never pass the NTSA safety requirements and once all this is added on the price will be >$20k.
Golf-cart-like small cars that cannot exceed 35mph do not require most of the NTSA stuff. But neighborhood only is a little too restricted unfortunately.
We are not talking about golf-cart-like vehicles but vehicles people will use daily and can operate on highways.
Can't the Fed simply print electricity and wires and transformers and pylons and robots to assemble it all and computers to run it all? Maybe Jared Bernstein (or other Bidenenomics geniuses) can figure it all out, since to him (them) the who and why money is printed and what is the relationship between printing and to the bond and general markets seems too complex.
It’s always interesting to see how figures are used to support a belief. The author’s bias is clear throughout.
No talk of how petro companies shut down early EV attempts, then claims EVs have been available for 100 years with insignificant success. No talk of how Tesla’s vehicles are out of reach of most people. No talk of the rapidly lowering prices of EVs.
Perhaps better to use a comparison date of less than ten years to analyse the success of the international EV market. The USA seems to have structural issues in purchasing from China but the rest of the world is rapidly increasing their EV purchases.
I have an Ebike that rules! In the end it takes 8hrs to charge and you get 2hrs of ride time. That is 2hrs of moving under power. So, for fun it's great. For business...... it can't compete with an IC engine. I see no way for an electric WORK VEHICLE to replace a diesel truck.
How did "petro companies shut down early EV attempts" that's a myth and even today the current low number of EV's are no threat to oil companies. How does an petro company shutdown a startup and who were they? EV's have been around for 100 years with insignificant success - how is this false? The major problem with EV's are the batteries and even after 100 years of development they are still very low energy density devices and maybe solid state batteries will help but they are still 10+ years off. It took Li-ion more than 20 years to go from lab to mass production.
EV purchases in the EU have also hit a wall since the early adopters have bought them already and the rest of us do not want to compromise on range, refueling, towing, etc. and what do you do when your battery loses too much range due to age. The average age of vehicle on the road is 12 years and a 12 year old EV will have lost almost 25% of its original range this does not happen with an ICE vehicle.
Mass adoption of EV's are still in the future and really will not arrive until a new battery technology enters mass production that is well beyond the limited energy density of Li-Ion's. I suspect by 2040 most of us will be driving some sort of hybrid EV+ICE vehicle but it will not be fully electric for a multitude of reasons.
I stand corrected on petro company interference with EV companies early last century. The technology just wasn’t sufficient early last century. However, petro companies are highly active today in making it hard for EVs. Their financial model is under threat with the world having agreed to zero net carbon emissions by 2050.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/16/oil-industry-electric-car-1729429
Mass adoption of EVs and batteries is already here but surely will increase as technologies are improved.
Chinese car brands are missing from the US market. That is one reason why it appears that EVs will not penetrate much of the market. China is pushing the world forward with their EV production and competition. However in the US 2023 EVs increased by 40% on 2022 numbers. World wide sales continue to increase rapidly but not exponentially. In contrast with the U.S. and EU, Norway is not imposing tariffs on electric cars imported from China. Government policy is key in encouraging the uptake of new low carbon technology. Norway is near 100% EVs. Petrol and diesel engine cars in Norway are “pretty much taxed so much that they're getting less and less interesting to buy." Carbon emissions and climate change is the driving force behind all of this.
https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2024-09-11/Norway-s-car-market-is-94-EVs-and-a-quarter-of-them-are-Chinese-1wNcImL8k8g/p.html#:~:text=Norway%20is%20getting%20very%20close,94%20percent%20EV%20market%20share.
(from 2019) https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/16/oil-industry-electric-car-1729429
Chart 8 should say “upstream”
I was in Durham, NC recently, where I saw one of these Cybertrucks ahead of me in traffic. Yep, it was every bit as "butt-ugly" as it is in the above photo. My personal wish for all this climate fraud is that the EV industry will lead the way in total and painful crashes of the wind / solar / EV industries. Without EVs to drive a need for "clean electric generation", lots of the arguments (real or imaginary) for wind & solar will also disappear. And remember, a true disruptor like Donald Trump might be all that's necessary to start the crashes of these Democrat / government-caused disasters, and a return to fossil fuels- with a resurrection of our nuclear industry around small modular reactors.
LOL, I also recently saw the butt ugly Cyber Truck on the road it truly is a crowning jewel of bad design. I suspect in a few years people will be almost giving these away.
Don't despair, Mayor Pete is working on it and has already built 8 new charging stations since the IRA was passed 2 years ago and at that rate we can have chargers all over the country by the year 20,024.
Not optimistic, stupid. At least to any remotely informed, rational human being, even at the time. I assume he’s still on the prognostication circuit getting paid a lot to talk shite to gullible liberals.
As far as chart 8 , the Green Goo is the centerpiece to China's bribery of Biden (and about 1000 or more other actors entrusted by the public who have done nothing more but sold that trust to the highest Chinese bidder )
ICEVs should be called GVs.
The TESLA TRUCK is designed to meet the needs of the para military militias that are preparing for the Civil War here in the USA … ever wonder why they made the truck bulletproof???
It's not bulletproof. It just looks like it. Like the British Quad artillery tractor of WWII. Which raises the question, "If it isn't bulletproof, why is it so ugly?" Also another question, "How much can it haul, compared to a Ford F-150? Weight and cargo box size, width and length?"
It is bullet proof, it is connected to Musk’s satellite system, and is made for the resistance when the US heads into Civil War
The problem with this analysis is it ignores the highly likely near-term revolution in battery technologies -- which promises to make batteries (40% of the cost of EVs) cheaper, faster charging, more durable (more recharges), better in cold weather, more energy dense (making them lighter and offering better range) and most of all -- cheaper. There are many candidates (in chemistry and format) and how many of them will succeed -- if ever -- is unknown, except for the likelihood some will succeed. Sodium-ion batteries are already real, with continuing progress on lithium-sulfur and others. Once cheap long range EVs arrive, the days of traditional gasoline cars is over. Adoptions curves tend to be slow, slow, slow... then overnight. Remember film cameras? Replaced by digital cameras, and now largely replaced by phones. The triumph of EVs may be more swift.
Scientists and battery experts, who have been optimistic in the recent past about improving lithium-ion batteries and about developing new battery chemistries—lithium/air and lithium/sulfur are the leading candidates—are considerably less optimistic now. Improvement in energy storage density of lithium-ion batteries has been only incremental for the past decade. A large-scale research consortium (the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research) has been created with an ambitious goal of improving energy storage density by a factor of five and reducing cost by a factor of five in 5 years. This can only happen if there is a terrific, wonderful, and amazing breakthrough in battery technology.
Interesting, thanks! You are clearly a fellow that knows things. But improvement by a factor of 5 ought not to be needed for mass adoption -- since EVs are (arguably, if there was a charging infrastructure) practical now. I realize "better" has many elements (density, speed of charging, repeatability of charging, safety, utility in winter, cost to buy, cost to recycle, affect on environment) but even a 50% improvement on some of those might be enough. Heck, if batteries were no better than current ones but 50% cheaper to buy might be enough. And don't Sodium-Ion batteries already do that? And on sale now in China in $19,000 EVs.
Show me when those revolutionary batteries are built and successfully in use EVs. Until then, I want to keep my taxes. Don’t worry, if anything that fabulous comes along the inventor and mfgr will get very rich.
But I’ll still object to the transportation system being subject to risks of loss of the grid.
Thanks, Robert. I point folks to your work because you put so much into objective analysis and presentation of the energy issues.
Coming out of a nuclear power life, besides the large stack of issues addressed (and even my constant chant of “don’t use electricity to make heat” - just for 2nd Law of Thermodynamics reasons), I also lived in risk analysis world.
From this, I note that shifting our transportation systems’ energy source from petroleum to electricity pushes the consequences of disturbances in the electric grid to also disrupt the transportation of people and goods, and it does this for illusory benefits. Whereas leaving their energy sources separate maintains good immunity for transportation. The electric grid has many potential modes of disruption. I wouldn’t want to drive transportation into taking on those vulnerabilities unless the benefits were very large and low cost and they are neither. We don’t need to lose everything from a power outage.
We have a large, mature fuel distribution system for petroleum. BTW: there’s a simple answer to any response that says that gas pumps need electricity. I can bring my portable generator over to power their pump.
It won't be hard at all for EVs to replace ICE vehicles. All they need to do is invent free batteries, and everyone will buy them.
I don’t understand why Musk focused resources on the stupid Cybertruck instead of a $25,000 small suv or sedan which would have been an instant winner.
Most of us don't understand why Musk does the things he does. That' why he's the world's richest man, and we aren't.