Michael Muntisov's Blog, page 4

The Energy Dance

In simpler times we used have community dances. Boys would congregate along one wall of the dance hall, and the girls on the other. Those brave enough would approach the other side and a dance would ensue, while the more timid stayed within the comfort of their respective groups. The same dynamic seems to be playing out in our energy transition. Climate skeptics think we are wasting vast sums on renewables, while the green lobby wants to stop all new fossil fuel production. There are very few wi...

Let’s talk about Nitrogen

What do you think of when someone mentions nitrogen? Maybe it would prompt the thought that it is fundamental to feeding the world’s eight million people. But it would come as no surprise if most of us would not know that for over a century, we have been “fixing” more and more nitrogen from the atmosphere and accumulating it in our soils and waters.

“Fixing” nitrogen means turning the element’s chemically inert gaseous form, which makes up 78% of the atmosphere, into a more reactive compound ...

The Trees for the Forest

Between 1766 and 1805, the Dublin Society made grants for planting a total of 55 million trees in Ireland. This was on the back of at least seven parliamentary acts dating back to 1698 which envisaged planting and preserving trees and woods, by encouraging tenant farmers to plant trees and to register them in a county repository.

It was probably the first state afforestation scheme anywhere in the world.

The scheme was required because of the massive demand for timber for ship building, co...

What does AI think about AI?

“Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion.” So said former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov speaking of artificial intelligence (AI). Kasparov sees an optimistic future for humans in their use of AI tools. He accepts that jobs will be lost to AI, but as a whole humans are in for a promotion. He believes we must give AI, and ourselves plenty of room to grow together.

So I thought I would check out...

Eight Lessons of History

Husband and wife team Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years writing their celebrated eleven-volume history The Story of Civilization. In the process they made note of the recurring patterns of human behaviour so that they might illuminate “future probabilities, the nature of man and the conduct of states”. The result was an essay entitled The Lessons of History.

There’s nothing like a few thousand years of history to put today’s dilemmas into some perspective, so here’s a summary of the top...

The Great Nuclear Hope

When a company with an iconic brand like Rolls Royce claims to have the ‘answer’ to the clean energy future, you are inclined to give them a hearing. And so it was with the launch of Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) nuclear technology. In conjunction with partners including US-based Exelon (one of the largest nuclear plant operators in the world), and the Qatar Investment Authority, Rolls Royce SMR proposes a major shift in the nature of nuclear power generation.

Large, traditional nuc...

The race to 100% renewable electricity

The holy grail of 100% renewable electricity for Australia finally appears to be within reach after the premier of the Australian state of Queensland recently announced her government’s ambitious energy and jobs plan.

Such an achievement would be a major milestone in reducing global emissions to levels agreed at the Paris Accord. But why would Australia achieving 100% renewable electricity be considered a milestone if it contributes only around 1 to 2% of global emissions?

First, Australia...

Shocking Secrets about Food

Western urban dwellers like me take for granted that we can buy whatever food takes our fancy by just popping down to our local shopping strip. That’s because every day, like clockwork, around two thousand tonnes of food is transported into cities for each million of its residents.

This ‘clockwork’ in the form of just-in-time logistics, honed over the last few decades, has been so optimized that most cities have only several days of food rations to draw on from within its boundaries at any on...

Technology is our God

The final iconic scene in the 1960s film Planet of the Apes is one of the most memorable in cinema history. Astronaut Charlton Heston discovers that the planet he’s been marooned on is in fact Earth and he has stumbled on the remnants of his own failed civilization some millennia later. It’s a stunning if fantastical moment.

Or is it?

We have in fact stumbled on failed civilizations in the past, admittedly not via time travel.

The most famous example is that of Easter Island. By the tim...

Every time history repeats, the price goes up

Rome was sacked by Gaul invaders in 390 BC, and in the 210s BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal wreaked havoc on the Italian Peninsula. Yet the Roman Empire survived and flourished over subsequent centuries, only falling to raiding ’barbarians’ more than five hundred years later.

Why did the early setbacks not lead to the fall of Rome while the later ones, when the Empire was at its grandest, did? The answer comes down to “complexity” and “energy”.

“Complexity” refers to the degree of a s...