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Michael – “…do we have a less voracious future, with more modest expectations?”
Whether we consider the depletion of fossil fuels or the limitations and mineral demands of ‘renewables’, a less energy intensive future seems inevitable, so adjusting our expectations would seem wise.
I have just checked on Wikipedia, and according to them, the United Kingdom, longer specifically, mines metals.
We used to mine Tungsten, Silver, Gold, Zinc, Lead, Iron, Tin, Copper.
We either no longer mine Coal or we are about to be mandated to no longer mine Coal.
We are, possibly, about to be mandated to no longer drill for Oil – Natural Gas.If Edward Samuel Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Miliband
wants us to go all electric, he needs to do some explaining.
1) where will the Steel we will need come from?
2) where will the Lithium we will need come from?
3) where will the Copper we will need come from?
4) where will the Lead we will need come from?
5) where will the Graphite we will need come from?
6) where will the Silver we will need come from?
7) where will the Tin we will need come from?
8) where will the Zinc we will need come from?
9) where will the chrome we need come from?
10) where will the Coltan come from?where will the Rare Earths we will need come from?
Can Ed answer any of these questions?
Can Ed let us know what we will trade with the rest of the world?
Can Labour also let us know about food security?I think we are about to go down a rabbit hole.
In case anyone has not heard of this, here is a taster, the Super Massive Eastern Mediterranean Methane Reserves.
The Eastern Mediterranean Methane Basin, this would include Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Israel, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Greece.
Perhaps the largest field is off Egypt.
The hub is supposed to be on Cyprus, so Egypt and Israel, perhaps Lebanon and Syria would feed the hub of Cyprus.
Some chemical engineering would happen in Cyprus, Electricity would be made in Cyprus for the use of Cyprus but also Electricity for Egypt and Electricity for Israel and Electricity for Jordan.
Politics is slowing down the opening up of these fields.
Russia was to be supplying the pipes and the pipelaying.
Turkey and Greece hate each other.
Turkey and Syria hate each other.Turkey thinks it should have access and control Cyprus.
Cyprus is a divided island.
Libya has been engulfed in War and does not have a functioning, unified government.
Israel is at war with Gaza, possibly about to go to war with Lebanon. Israel has effectively been at war with Syria, for a long time. Egypt is run by a Junta. Egypt is effectively bankrupt.
Turkey is effectively bankrupt.
Lebanon is bankrupt.
Greece is probably, effective on the rocks.
Cyprus was doing alright with pandering to Russians but H.R.Clinton, effectively put and end to those arrangements.
The Houthis are at war with Israel and effectively the Suez canal no longer brings a working profit into the coffers of Egypt. So other than wars and politics, this could be a winner for the Middle East and a winner for South East Europe.I wonder who has messed this all up?
It has been said, that there is more than 100 years supply for the Middle East and for Europe, in this Eastern Mediterranean basin.
What is needed is a resolution of politics and less messing about by America.
If Donald Trump gets elected as the next President of America, he might require his troops to exit Syria.
This would open the way for the Shia Crescent, to lay a gas pipeline from The Caspian Basin to the Eastern Mediterranean.
This would bring almost unlimited Methane from The Gulf of Persia and Ex-Soviet Central Asia and Russia and Iraq, almost directly to the markets of the Mediterranean.
I doubt Joe Biden would allow this to happen.This looks like a good idea
Llantrisant in Wales
Royal mint now turn old electronic stuff into gold.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6p2k11e41po
“The company has built a large industrial plant on its site in Llantrisant in Wales to remove the precious metal from old circuit boards.The gold is initially being used to craft jewellery and later it will be made into commemorative coins.
E-waste, which includes anything from old phones and computers to TVs, is a rapidly growing problem”
I wonder how economical it is to do even if it’s a good idea. I guess they must think it is or they wouldn’t be doing it. There have been lots of YT videos of people doing this in their garages. Not watched one in a while but I recall there are a lot of strong acids and other chemicals involved plus you have to break down the printed circuit boards, chips etc. to get at the gold.
Guess I should have read the whole article :). It explains some of what I asked.
Read Confessions of an Eco Sinner. In its second section, Downstream, it has a chapter describing children in a poor country sloshing discarded circuit boards about in tubs of dangerous and toxic chemicals to recover gold.
Children in rich countries get addicted to using the electronic devices their parents buy for them. Such devices have a high turnover; they soon become unfashionable and get replaced. In poor countries children get ill and permanently damaged ‘recycling’ them. Big companies make lots of money, a little of which they use to bribe political parties and distort ‘news’ media.
Children in rich countries get addicted to using the electronic devices their parents buy to keep them quiet while they watch TV with all its advertising.
Sorry to rant, but commercialism makes me sick. It’s making everyone sick and killing the biosphere.
This isn’t going to stop of its own accord. Britain can afford a fancy new gold reclamation facility, so like a proud owner of a brand new Tesla EV can think of itself as “saving the planet”. But as poorer countries climb the greasy pole of “economic growth”, their ‘recycling’ will get sent to the hapless gold-recovering children in some faraway land, because that method is cheaper.
Serbia
“Thousands of people in Serbia have protested in Belgrade against plans to mine one of Europe’s largest deposits of lithium – a crucial raw material for electric car batteries.Activists say the mine would cause irreversible environmental destruction to Serbia’s Jadar Valley, where the deposit is located.
A licence granted to mining giant Rio Tinto was revoked in 2022, following widespread protests in the country, but the project was restarted last month following a court decision and government U-turn.”
I wonder who could have put the Serbian Government under so much pressure?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cged9qgwrvyo
Protesters in the capital chanted “Rio Tinto get out of Serbia” and held banners saying “We do not give Serbia away” as they marched through the city. Others are lying on railway tracks.Big money and influence against local democracy.
Burniston is a lovely little rural village just north of Scarborough, on the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Heritage Coast and at the southern edge of the North York Moors national park:
https://www.google.com/search?q=burniston
Europa Oil & Gas Ltd in partnership with two companies in the Heyco Energy Group, Egdon Resources and Petrichor Energy UK Limited, want to turn it into an “exploratory” gas fracking site:
The locals are unanimously opposed:
“Europa” is actually a branch of a US company; I don’t know about the other two. The proposed well is “exploratory”, but why would the companies bother exploring unless they wanted to extract the gas?
The parish and county councils can object all they like. Many have before; Westminster just overrule them. The companies’ most optimistic estimate is that the site, if fully “developed”, could produce gas at 1/2800th of the rate the UK burns it.
Diamonds are for ever
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/c89wd517dy1o
A real Big OneI have a gold half hunter watch about one hundred years old, it was my grandfather’s, I think it says 17 jewels.
I know they use diamond for diamond cutting concrete, I have heard they use diamonds in the space industry.
Diamonds are Carbon.
Maybe they are evil?The most important metal in a Super Alloy in Nickel.
These metal alloys are used in jet engines. For Europe, almost all the Nickel used to come from Russia or Ukraine.
So where do we get our Nickel from these days?
France gets its Nickel from its overseas land of New Caledonia but New Caledonia is always rioting as “some”no longer wish to be ruled by France. The most important “Listening” Station in the Southern hemisphere is New Caledonia.
France used to get its Uranium from Russia and from its old colonies in Africa.
This no longer happens.
Where does the Uranium for U.K. and France come from these days?
Europe is getting shafted.To give some food for thought on the issue of diet, as a first time forum poster having read a few pages here but not having the time at the moment to read the whole thread, the first author I read on environmental issues as a teenager was a Finnish deep ecologist and traditional fisherman called Pentti Linkola.
He was a little known but controversial figure; the most toothed environmentalist I’ve ever read, with a fierce love for life, forests, and wild animals. He was someone who saw his native forests diminish around him (as the capitalist government always lied and exaggerated the conditions of the forest to keep prices of timber low), and was eager to brainstorm and try desperately to think of practical solutions.
A few of his essays in English.
Linkola gave an interesting argument against all the common suggestions of a vegetarian or vegan diet, in his essay “A Glance At Vegetarianism,” also “Can We Survive?;” arguing the problem is the way we do agriculture, but that we would actually be better off with meat-centric diets relying on agroforestry and silviculture. From a forest one can receive a productive bounty of plants and animal protein, while sequestering carbon and providing a habitat better suited for wild animals. Fields of vegetable crop, on the other hand, diminish the forests and do not produce enough nutrition and calories for the space they use.
(It is worth noting that if jobs become more physical again and muscle is used once more as a primary form of energy production as the author of the aforementioned Do the Math blog mentions as a likely possibility, the calorie needs of physical work are enormous compared to what the modern lifestyle requires.)
This is similar to what many people have done traditionally across the world, particularly Native Americans, whose agriculture relied on agroforestry and was thus unrecognisable as such to the colonists. (In the Amazon, aquaculture also flourished and was notably advanced; yet unknown completely in many other places, historically.)
A few relevant excerpts:
There are also other weaknesses in “the ecology of vegetarianism”. Many very unproductive and poorly nutritional vegetables demand immoderate acreages for cultivation. In fact, only few vegetables are sufficient (peas, beans, cabbages), and few fair (grains) as main nourishment.
Also the increasing of woodland acreage is necessary. All wastelands, banks and fields that absorb carbon a little or not at all, are afforested. In the different passages of this program, little increments are gotten to the forest acreage in a multitude of ways.
Reforesting a significant part of field acreage is the most notable of turns, which will be made possible by replacing grain with mostly animal protein in nutrition. Taking the production of inland- and coastal waters into use, that is wholly unutilized in the suicidal society. Annual profit, or interest, is reaped from the whole fauna of fish, and also from the fish species that have been titled as junk fish by the whims of fashion and prejudice, which are just as excellent food. Fish catch can be sustainably multiplied a hundred times, and perhaps a third or a half of the nutritional content of grain and other vegetables can be substituted with first-class animal protein. A corresponding share of the field area is afforested as a truly significant carbon binder.
I certainly think it might be an easier sell to most of the public to require eating more meat rather than less or none, as well! Of late, I’ve come to think that is a significant advantage, especially against those advocating for insect-based diets that are very unpopular.
Too much unpopular environmental politics going around that cannot be afforded in this desperate time; what is needed is highly effective and popular policies, but what we get is more often corporations seeking to blame ‘the common people’ for the problems they created and creating significant backlash against environmentalism. What worries me as much as the environmental problems themselves is that this will make them insoluble.
Regarding the mineral shortages, which ties directly back to the not often discussed issue of overpopulation, I think it constitutes one of the most significant problems (the author of Do the Math makes the point in one of his essays that the copper requirements alone make green energy such as solar effectively impossible, and that it is therefore more about saving civilisation as we know it than the environment itself).
After considering it for a long time, I have come to think there is probably no solution that can be practically implemented to solve this matter; people will resist greatly any significant reduction in quality of life, and changes in lifestyle must come slowly and on society’s own terms or met with great resistance. The authoritarian might see no problem with forcing this, but even if I were one rather than anti-authoritarian, I simply think it is too unpopular and impractical to succeed.
The future complete failure of modern systems to sustain themselves due to resource shortages, and the for-profit markets only considering the short term, might lead to apocalyptic levels of suffering. On the other hand, it is pretty much impossible to imagine any way the population could be reduced to sustainable levels ethically.
In “The Human Nature And History,” Linkola wrote:
It won’t go that way, not honorably, but exactly so that the coming ages are – at a fast pace – more and more cynical and cruel. Definitely people won’t proceed to the end of diminishing and ruin while hugging each other. The ending stages are indescribably terrible war of all against all, where the amount of suffering is maximal.
I think this monstrous future comes closer all the time, that we are already seeing the consequences of resource shortage, etc, although of course much of it is artificial, due to failures of capitalism, and so on. What to do to solve the problem ethically?
The only possibility I can think of, however impractical, is probably space colonisation. Space is boundless, there is an endless amount of both it and resources, if we could get to them—a pretty big if! Without it, it seems an inhuman Malthusian calculus becomes necessary trying to divvy up who gets what, who makes the sacrifices, and so on, and I don’t think human nature will ever allow that. And if we go that route, we will need a spiritual transformation as well, since obviously exponential growth cannot be sustained in population or economics even in space.
Agree very much with what you write, Emma – a cogent, well-articulated post thank you. My only contention is your final paragraph, but I note your qualifications. The space colonisation is just a fantasy. Imagine if Venus or Mars were suddenly transformed into habitable planets – just like Earth. I’m sure there would be much celebration – but aside from the technical and practical difficulties of transporting billions of people to a new home, would it be a good thing?
Considering exponential growth and Bartlett’s tale of bacteria in a glass jar, we’d overpopulate and deplete the resources of that planet in a very short time – a few centuries at most. Then what? Find another?
You mention a spiritual transformation, which I also agree with. Have you read Iain McGilchrist’s ‘Master & His Emissary’? We may already have the capabilities to explore a different dimension without destroying ourselves or our environment in the process.
I wouldn’t worry too much about population. It will crash shortly and there is nothing we can do about it except embrace the change it will herald.
Great post, thanks again.
Emma M
Thank you very much for those two posts.
Obviously the human numbers having gone from two billion around 1900 to around eight billion, today, is not a sustainable future, for humans.
Simalar to saying we need more growth, only then can we pay for civil servants and the public sector.
In the U.K. The New Labour Government are ramping up pay to the public sector, yet all around us, the services we are offered are collapsing?
Ever higher wages for public service workers does not seem to roll out to better services. A massive rethink is needed.
You can’t just keep making lives more and more shit for the ordinary people but that is where we are.
The U.K. like France like Germany are collapsing, we seem to be coming to the end of the road.
The only “growth” we have had in the U.K. over the last thirty years is in people coming in from overseas, so we have “grown” our population, we are getting day by day closer to the edge. I doubt we will all die in a fire pit of Global Warming but there is not enough Copper to make the all electric future happen.
Maybe the all electric future is a diversion, so we think about Global Warming and the all electric future, whilst not noticing that you can not see a G.P. and your dustbin is now not emptied once a week but now only once every three weeks?Michael,
How do other animals survive and flourish on this planet without all the things you mention – politics, money, copper, electricity, doctors, bin-men & etc? How is it even possible?
Best,
