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Lapsed Agnostic, care to hand-wave away the sixth mass extinction human activity is currently producing?
It’s funny how “Malthusian” has become an insult; any number of species can be observed to suffer population crashes. I have read that Malthus held some obnoxious opinions, but that isn’t what his detractors are upset about; it’s that he dared hypothesise a limit to human population growth. Not sure why they’d want to live on a planet with standing room only and no other species. Oh yes, outer space, I forgot. It’ll be just like Hollywood.
Michael, Ed Milliband seems to be living rent-free in your head. Call the bailiffs mate.
Thanks for you reply ET. I think Clark has addressed your query about the discrepancy between the two sets of figures. I’d imagine that the OWID ones are designed to make it appear that renewables are currently more prevalent than they really are. My remark about maths wasn’t addressed to you, but to people like Natasha who are simply not interested in any discussion of numbers, presumably because it detracts from their beliefs about a future powered by renewables not being possible.
Thanks for your reply Shibboleth. Personally, I’d go with the IEA, rather than Tom Murphy or Bill Rees – on balance. Technically, no form of energy is renewable as it is all eventually being radiated into space as photons – mainly infra-red ones – but enough energy is arriving from the Sun every second, and will do for billions of years, that it may as well be renewable. The minerals used in renewables don’t need to be infinite since we don’t require an infinite amount of energy.
Thanks for your reply Michael. There’s more than enough copper on Earth to provide an all-electric future for eight billion people – and even for the ten billion that are forecast to be inhabiting our planet by 2050. Here’s how much copper there is in the uppermost kilometre of the continental crust: ca. 20,000,000,000,000 tonnes – 20,000 tonnes per person. However, we’ll need nowhere near that much. Let’s assume we’re generating all our renewable energy from massive 14.7 MW offshore wind turbines in windy seas (the kind that are currently being built on Dogger Bank), and that all these have a load factor of at least 62% (which is now a requirement for offshore turbines in the UK sector of the North Sea). This means that on average each wind turbine will be generating at least 9 megawatts of electricity. So to generate the 10 terawatts required we’ll need around 1.1 million of them, or 70,000 a year being built over 15 years. These turbines weigh around 2000 tonnes of which about 1% is copper (i.e. 20 tonnes). So each year we’ll need around 1.4 million tonnes of copper (plus a bit more for the cables to shore). This represents a 7.5% increase on current annual global copper production of 20 million tonnes. This should be perfectly doable, but in a parallel universe where it’s not, there’s ways around that: there’s plenty of aluminium about.
Millions of people are not going to starve unless food is deliberately being withheld from them (like in Gaza) or, God forbid, there’s a full-scale nuclear war between NATO & Russia and/or China.
P.S. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mock people who run whelk stalls – it’s harder than it looks.
As far as I’m aware, Clark, the only species Malthus wrote about was Homo Sapiens. I have more sympathy towards him than many, as it would have been very difficult for him to envisage things like average British wheat yields of over 10 tonnes per hectare (versus the 1-2 tonne yields of his day), or the contraceptive pill.
As regards species extinctions, we basically have three options:
1) Cease all fossil fuel production within the next five years, and live with much lower energy production until sufficient renewables are installed over 15-20 years, which will likely result in a temperature rise of 1.5 – 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. (This is probably your favourite).
2) Continue as we are now, with some subsidies for renewables (as well as for fossil fuels) which will likely result in a near full transition to renewables over the next 20-30 years, and a temperature rise of 2 – 2.5 degrees. (This is my favourite).
3) Scrap all subsidies for renewables (whilst keeping the ones for fossil fuels in place), and let the market generate a full transition to renewables (mainly on the basis of cost) over the next 30-40 years, which will likely lead to temperature rises of 2.5 – 4 degrees. (This is the fossil fuel companies’ & Bjorn Lomborg’s favourite).
In all cases, some species will go extinct in the wild (like over 99.9% species that have ever existed) because they can’t adapt to the temperature rises – though many of them will be preserved (or have their DNA sequences preserved, and thus probably be able to be revived at some point in the future) by human beings.
P.S. What would you think if you overheard someone in a pub say: “Not sure why these pro-immigration types want to live in a country with standing room only and no white people”?
Lapsed Agnostic, you seem uninformed of the extinction crisis. Species were already being driven extinct orders of magnitude faster than the background rate before emissions-driven temperature increase became significant.
My preferred strategy for fossil fuel reduction is to issue to everyone in the world a saleable fossil fuel ration that decreases year on year in accordance with IPCC emission reduction targets.
Michael, think about my above recommendation and how rich it would make you.
When we were growing up, most of us were thin and hungry, also often cold.
Other than the coal fire, just in the living room, no heating, no washing machine, no telephone, no T.V. no refrigerator, no freezer, no double glazing. But nobody had much more.
One day, a neighbour got a television, about twenty children, pressed up against their living room window trying to see what a televison was, until the man opened the window and told us to fuck off.
Maybe, people should expect to have less stuff?Michael, my early years were more affluent than yours. Dad’s dad had been a police officer and a publican, and Dad had inherited from him. Dad had also worked in local government, and then as an NHS administrator, so he was quite well paid, though it wasn’t much by modern standards. He had bought a TV with his WWII discharge money, and he told a story about how he’d invited the neighbours in to watch the FA Cup Final, but that was before I had been born. We had an oil burner in the living room, a gas fridge but no freezer, and a washing machine, but it was manual with a wringer. We didn’t go hungry, but there wasn’t much hot water and my parents repaired everything they could. Mum kept an allotment and fixed clothing, Dad did his own glazing and did all his own maintenance on the car he used for commuting. I had friends who were poor compared with us, especially the older folk who often had just a paraffin heater for warmth.
But the modern throw-away lifestyle is alien to me; I hate it.
I didn’t find out until the wall came down and I met East Europeans, but at the same time in the USSR, every apartment block had a communal telephone, but there were no telephone bills. The apartments had communal heating, but again, no bills. There were municipal swimming pools, but no charge to use them.
I’m not calling one political system bad and another good, but we could be comfortable with less stuff by sharing more.
Lapsed Agnostic and Michael, I think you’d both best look at this:
Death by Hockey Sticks
Lapsed Agnostic, your treatment of resource availability is simplistic and unrealistic. As I’ve mentioned before, your reductionist approach is misleading. You divide up the systemic problem into parts, and then present seemingly easy solutions to the parts. Reality is more demanding than that.
The highest concentrations of, say, copper were mined out long since; available concentration continually falls. The lower the concentration, the more effort and ecological damage it takes to extract it – and we’re already in an ecological and extinction crisis. Extraction of each resource depends upon multiple other resources, each of which are similarly being depleted. One critical resource in this complex is fossil liquid fuel, which is depleting fast. Biofuels, you’ll say. But we’d need ten times the current agricultural land to replace fossil liquid fuels – and we’re already in an ecological and extinction crisis, while climate change plays havoc with our agriculture.
Oh, and demand keeps rising nearly exponentially. And the investment (i.e. debt) based financial system needs perpetual exponential growth of returns to prevent it crashing in a debt repayment crisis.
All these things and countless more are interdependent. We need to come up with a plan, and fast.
Lapsed Agnostic, here are some more examples of your reductionist tunnel vision:
– “though many [species] will be preserved (or have their DNA sequences preserved, and thus probably be able to be revived at some point in the future) by human beings.”
This is techno-optimism on steroids. Grief, haven’t you heard of epigenetics? There’s more to an organism than its DNA, and more to a species than its genome. Haven’t you heard that many species from zoos fail to recreate wild populations, because they need to be parented in the wild in order to learn wilderness skills? Out in the sticks where I live, the behavioural difference is glaringly obvious between young wild pheasants versus young pheasants raised in pens by a gamekeeper. Haven’t you heard that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts?
It isn’t obvious in which direction your agnosticism lapsed, but you’re just a human, not a creator, not God. Destroy what you can’t create at your peril, and mine, and that of all life on Earth.
Lapsed Agnostic – September 21, 2024 at 14:01
Quote
“Thanks for your reply Michael. There’s more than enough copper on Earth to provide an all-electric future for eight billion people – and even for the ten billion that are forecast to be inhabiting our planet by 2050.”There is not more than enough economically recoverable Copper.
The Unsustainable Green Transition | Simon Michaux
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwmygkdoGgc&t=3345sMaybe if Graphene can be made economically, we might have a chance.
Other than that there will not, cannot be enough green electricity for the whole planet.More likely world war three will stop us talking about all electric future
30% of all the world’s tradeable commodities are in Russia.
Essentially Russia has very little foreign debt.
Russia has unlimited trees.
Russia has unlimited fresh water.The only thing they do’t have enough of is people.
Some are suggesting that the Ukraine war is about smashing Russia, so they don’t take the crown of hegemon off of the U.S.A. It is at least partially about the West getting these metals without trading with a Russia that will have the whip hand. They have so much basic resource in Russia that they are immortal
I’m a bit busy at the moment, Clark, so I’ll deal with the mass extinctions & rewilding stuff at a later date, if that’s all right – this forum is concerned with the availability of minerals for a complete transition to renewables anyway.
A reductionist approach can work perfectly well in solving technical problems. It doesn’t matter about ore grades, as we don’t have to mine a single ounce more of copper to enable the green transition. For a start, in most instances, we can use aluminium, but even if we don’t, there more than enough copper already out there – which conveniently also doesn’t have to be smelted. For example, there’s a considerable length of copper piping in the house in which I’m writing this – that can all be replaced by stainless steel and sold to the turbine / solar panel manufacturers.
As I may have mentioned before, there’s enough global P90 oil reserves to last another 50 years at the current rate of use (not including shale) – and due to the adoption of EVs, that rate of use will soon be decreasing, if it it isn’t decreasing already. Oil can also be made from coal, like Sasol did for decades in South Africa – it just costs a bit more. Biofuels will be useful for things like heavy vehicles and planes, and we’ll probably need less land than in currently being used to grow biofuels in Western countries.
Lapsed Agnostic – “As I may have mentioned before, there’s enough global P90 oil reserves to last another 50 years at the current rate of use…”
Yes you did mention it before, and again your treatment was exclusively reductionist. Reductionism is great, it’s extremely powerful, but it’s only half the story. We have to zoom out, examine systemically, as well as zooming in and examining the parts.
For instance, your comment above entirely overlooks the effects of depletion. Depletion reduces availability, as well as reducing EROEI. You really should take this seriously seeing as the whole enterprise of industrialisation, including the proposed energy transition, is dependent upon sufficiently sustained availability of liquid fuels.
– “…if it it isn’t decreasing already”
No, it’s still increasing.
The natural extraction / depletion curve is a symmetrical bell shape. “Advanced recovery techniques” including shale extraction can extend the rise and heighten the peak – but at the cost of turning the downside into a cliff. Since humanity has been on the upslope of liquid fuel extraction for 150 years, “oil reserves to last another 50 years at the current rate of use” is actually very scary. And “economic growth”, locked in by the financial system, demands that “the current rate of use” keeps rising, which it is, check the graphs.
– “…there’s a considerable length of copper piping in the house in which I’m writing this – that can all be replaced by stainless steel and sold to the turbine / solar panel manufacturers.”
See? Hopelessly reductionist. They’re going to come to all our houses and replace all our pipes using electric vehicles that haven’t been built yet and can only be built at the rate they get copper, while there’s still insufficient grid capacity to charge them, are they? Or are they going to burn a load of the remaining fossil liquid fuel to do this? In the raging storms and floods all these extra emissions are producing. And the price of copper will rise high enough to incentivise this replacement, despite the immense inconvenience of having the floor of every room in your house ripped up to replace your entire plumbing system. But this increased price of copper has to be paid for through your electricity bill…
We’re in an emergency. Complacency is lethal.
“We don’t have to mine a single ounce more of copper to enable the green transition”
https://www.google.com/search?q=david+lammy+mastermind&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBGB790GB790&oq=David+Lammy&aqs=chrome.2.0i355i433i512j46i433i512j0i131i433i512j0i3j0i131i433i512j0i3l2j0i512j0i131i433i512i650j0i433i512.7243j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:fbdfc4b0,vid:DsR4Nx-ELgc,st:0better tell that to Ed. Milliband, David lammy and Sir Starmer, they will need a good laugh, after this week.
Lapsed Agnostic
If only life were simple but life has almost always been complex.
In actuality the essence of life is complexity.
There is a phrase “complex life”
Essentially complex life arose because of complex interactions.
perhaps Archaea absorbed mitochondria becoming Eucaryota?
Life has been complex for at least a billion years. It has tended to become more complex.
Yet you want to reduce complexity, does that mean you cannot accept reality?
The interactions and whirling of Carbon, is not fully understood, yet, some would have you believe they know it all but they are deluded.
There is phenomenal Carbon production in the bottom of the sea, in the sediments and in the rocks beneath the seas.
Mostly, as this Carbon rises, Methane – it is consumed by life.
It is thought, by some, that the majority of mass of life in the oceans is Archaea, yet forty years ago, nobody knew of Archaea. Nobody knew of Black smokers, nobody knew of whale fall, nobody knew of Dark Oxygen
https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/dark-oxygen-discovered-deep-sea/#:~:text=Dark%20oxygen%20discovered%20in%20the%20deep%20sea%20spells%20trouble%20for%20seabed%20mining%20industry,-Nick%20Young%2026&text=Scientists%20have%20found%20a%20source,zone%20for%20deep%20sea%20mining.Why do you think reductionism will hold any meaning?
Because of budget restraints, the German government, last year, removed incentives for the public to buy E.V.
This year in Germany, the sales of E.V. have nosedived.
The German car manufactures are really struggling, this is between 5%-9% of total German G.D.P.,
depending if you include all the other firms that piggyback on the auto industry.
Germany, the economic powerhouse of the E.U. has been in recession for two years.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OjbSdVPEN8
Germany is thinking of giving up helping Ukraine and instead helping Germany.
This will eventually mean using Russian Methane.Thanks for your reply Michael. Apologies for the late reply – my old man’s recently been admitted to the local resistant bacteria factory (a.k.a. hospital) with heart problems, so I’ve been a bit pre-occupied of late. Anyways, to address (some of) your points:
There is more than enough economically recoverable copper ore in the ground if the price doubles. Renewables manufacturers won’t like having to pay more for it but, since copper only comprises around 1% of the mass of their products, they can increase their prices by around 1% to maintain their profits.
I think you may mean graphite not graphene. There’s more than enough of that as well, provided you’re storing most of your energy using things like hydrogen & compressed air, rather than lithium-ion batteries. Prof. Simon Michaux’s calculations in the YT video you posted assume that we only use batteries, which is why he obtains astronomical numbers for the quantities of mineral resources he claims we’ll need. Whether that’s an oversight or whether he’s being deliberately disingenuous, I don’t know.
Russia doesn’t have unlimited anything, nor does it have 30% of the world’s tradable commodities.
I doubt whether I’d be allowed close enough to Ed Miliband, Lammy or Starmzy to tell them anything – but if I were they’d do well to listen and take heed of what I say. The fact remains that we don’t have to mine a single ounce more of copper to enable a full transition to renewables and, whatever Lammy or anyone else thinks, that’s just as much a fact as Edward VI succeeding his father Henry VIII as King of England.
I don’t want to reduce complexity – I want to understand (at least some) complexity. Any thought process can be described as ‘reductionist’ if it doesn’t encompass the entire universe (currently observable, eventually observable, and never observable) in the entirety of space and time – and maybe countless parallel universes as well. However, that doesn’t mean that such thinking holds no meaning – if it did, essentially no thinking holds any meaning.
Many Archaea were known more than 40 years ago – they just weren’t called Archaea until classified as such by Carl Woese in 1977. Black smokers were discovered 45 years ago.
Hope that helps. Have to go visit my dad again now.
Lapsed Agnostic, best wishes for your dad.
Lapsed Agnostic, I hope your Father pulls through.
I thank you for your replies, I found them amusing and interesting – not boring.
MichaelIt would seem, some of the steam is coming off the sales of E.V., especially to ordinary people, who are not completely convinced of an all electric future.
Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium ore
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8mvmmpmvro
quote BBC
“Often called “white gold” and the key component in rechargeable batteries, the metal lithium is so light that it floats on water, but its price has sunk like a stone over the past year.Due to a combination of falling global sales of electric vehicles, and a world oversupply, external of lithium ore, the cost of the main lithium compound has fallen, external by more than three quarters since June 2023.
This decline has had a particularly hard impact on Australia, because it is the world’s largest producer of lithium ore, accounting for 52% of the global total, external last year.”
So over the last year, the price of Methane has fallen, the price of oil has fallen and the price of Lithium has fallen.
I wonder what’s going on, could it be a harbinger of economic collapse?Hope you dad is doing well Lapsed Agnostic.
