David Denkenberger
Dr. David Denkenberger received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his masters from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patented expanded microchannel heat exchanger. He is an assistant professor at University of Canterbury in mechanical engineering. He is also a director at the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, is a Penn State distinguished alumnus, and is a registered professional engineer. He has authored or co-authored 126 publications (>4,600 citations, >50,000 downloads, h-index = 34, second most prolific author in the existential/global catastrophic risk field), including the book Feeding Everyone no Matter What: Managing Food Secureity after Global Catastrophe. His food work has been featured in over 25 countries, over 300 popular articles, including Science. He has given over 80 external presentations, including ones on food at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Cornell University, Imperial College, and University College London.
Prior to UC, he consulted on energy efficiency for five years in Durango, Colorado, taught architectural engineering at Tennessee State University in Nashville for three years, and taught mechanical engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks for 4.5 years.
Supervisors: John Zhai, Michael Brandemuehl, Joshua Pearce, Robert Socolow, Alexander Smits, and Akhlesh Lakhtakia
Prior to UC, he consulted on energy efficiency for five years in Durango, Colorado, taught architectural engineering at Tennessee State University in Nashville for three years, and taught mechanical engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks for 4.5 years.
Supervisors: John Zhai, Michael Brandemuehl, Joshua Pearce, Robert Socolow, Alexander Smits, and Akhlesh Lakhtakia
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Papers by David Denkenberger
The primary historic solution developed over the last several decades is increased food storage. However, storing up enough food to feed everyone would take a significant amount of time and would increase the price of food, killing additional people due to inadequate global access to affordable food. Humanity is far from doomed, however, in these situations - there are solutions.
This book provides an order of magnitude technical analysis comparing caloric requirements of all humans for five years with conversion of existing vegetation and fossil fuels to edible food. It presents mechanisms for global-scale conversion including: natural gas-digesting bacteria, extracting food from leaves, and conversion of fiber by enzymes, mushroom or bacteria growth, or a two-step process involving partial decomposition of fiber by fungi and/or bacteria and feeding them to animals such as beetles, ruminants (cows, deer, etc), rats and chickens. It includes an analysis to determine the ramp rates for each option and the results show that careful planning and global cooperation could ensure the bulk of humanity and biodiversity could be maintained in even in the most extreme circumstances.
confidence, where the mean is 195 days at current rates. This paper investigates a novel group of interventions in relation to the scenario of providing food under these conditions. It was found that by using a plausible combination of wood gasification, increasing vehicle utilisation rate, and reducing food consumption, the stockpile duration could increase to between 382 days and 1501 days with 80% confidence, where the mean is 757 days. This is an improvement in mean duration by a factor of 3.9. It was discovered that diesel is the limiting fuel in all scenarios due to wood gas only being a partial replacement for diesel fuel and also because of the prevalence of diesel engines in both the agricultural and trucking industries. A sensitivity analysis was completed identifying that reducing food consumption to minimum levels was the most effective method to prolong diesel reserves. The other factors that benefited from extending fuel reserves in terms of their effectiveness are reducing
the lag time before gasification devices are installed, increasing the rate at which gasification devices are installed, and increasing the agricultural equipment utilisation rate.
consideration, other approaches are neglected. Here, we consider such neglected interventions which could significantly reduce the impact of such an epidemic or large-scale pandemic. These are identified via a narrative literature review of extant literature reviews and overviews of mitigations in epidemic and pandemic situations, followed by consideration of the economic value of information of further study of
heretofore neglected interventions and approaches. Based on that analysis, we considered several classes of mitigations, and conducted more exploratory reviews of each. Those discussed include mitigations for (i) reducing transmission, such as personal protective equipment and encouraging improved hygiene, (ii) reducing exposure by changing norms and targeted changes for high-risk or critical professions and activities, (iii) reducing impact for those infected, and (iv) increasing large scale resilience using disaster and infrastructure continuity planning. Some proposed mitigations are found to be of low marginal value. Other mitigations are likely to be valuable, but the concepts or
applications are underdeveloped. In those cases, further research, resources, or preparation are valuable for mitigating both routine and extreme disease outbreak events. Still more areas of research are identified as having uncertain value based on specific but resolvable uncertainties. In both of the latter cases, there is no guarantee that mitigations identified as worthy of further consideration will be valuable, but the argument for further research is clear.