Green energy and why we are too late to do it in time

[alhoon]

Check this article.
In short, the article says that the transition to Green Energy that can sustain our current way of life and de-coupling from oil will take 50-100 years at our current production capabilities (we need copper for cables, we need materials for turbines etc). And we do not have 50-100 years. The Green Energy myth is dangerous. Not because we don't need Green Energy but because it is a case of "too little, too late".
And no, it is NOT a pro-oil article.

Dr. Michaux (whom I have worked with in Liege 7 years ago) is not pro-oil or fossil fuel. What Dr. Michaux is saying is "We cannot cut our dependency from oil quick enough to stop the devastating effects of Climate Change because setting up Renewables to replace it will take decades that we don't have."

It is an alarming message if you want, a bleak one. But the numbers are that bad. This is indeed the situation and wishful thinking that we have a chance to transition while climate change already destroys crops at unprecedented rate is dangerous.

The solution is to invest HEAVILY in MITIGATION of the climate change threats. Also, A STRONG change of life that will impact all of us a lot ... but will be much less painful than if we continue in our current path.


Now, alhoon's take on the "We should make drastic changes and we should do them now" is:

1. we should go for rapid and steep power cost increase, with government support for the poor to be able to afford it but with heavy hits for luxuries. Heated pools? AC 10 Celcius (18F) below outside temperature? LoL. Energy for those things should be extremely expensive. Recycling aluminium instead of the energy-intensive production.

2. transitioning to (unfortunately unhealthy) GM food that can survive draughts and heat one year and then floods and ice the next year, etc. Diversification and protection of the food sources we have and trying to keep Food security that is already being threatened by climate change. I hate the idea that I would have to feed on GMO and die from cancer at 65 and my kids having a much increased chance to have three arms. But I dislike starvation more and this is where we are at this point.
See how olive oil production is falling around the Mediterranean the past few years.

3. Focus on things produced locally to limit energy use to bring them from abroad. And learn to pay much more for things because they have to be transported. A +50$ price on iPhones because they have to be transported all the way from China could be mitigated by changing your iPhone every 4 years instead of every 2, unless you are rich.
We have to learn to live with less because that's what the earth can support.

4. A strong (and I mean strong) global reaction to China and India, to force them to stop polluting like crazy, explaining to them that "sorry, we know it sucks for you that you will not be able to afford the standard of living we got in the west in the polluting years, but if you keep doing that, we will all die."

5. Focus on mining what we need to make a quick transition to renewable energy. Increase the mines world-wide. Low population, metal-rich countries (Canada, Russia, Australia) should rump up mining. Open more mines. Many more. Bring in workers from poor countries, train them, and send them to the mines. Open more mineral resources universities (or hire the Greek ones, the majority of which work on other fields because we don't have mines for the engineers we produce).
And when opening mines, focus on humans-first policies.
Again, sucks for some Cariboo in Canada that their entire ecosystem will have to go away and they will become extinct, but it is either the Cariboo or us and the Cariboo at this point.
Tree-huggers can keep the DNA of those Cariboo and clone them in the future, after we survive as a species.

[AqD]

Since nobody has replied anything, I'll add my simple observation here - We never needed to mitigate climate changes, like, NEVER.


Whenever humans grow beyond the capacity of environment and technological limits, we start dying by various means - famine, plague, flood, war, etc. Once the population is reduced below a certain amount, the balance is restored and mass dying stops.

It's a foreign concept to those in Europe and Americas, but quite common back on the eastern steppe with harsh environment and in East Asia, where the self-proclaimed middle-kingdom entered a phase of complete chaos once a few centuries; Usually tons of natural disasters happened at once, then the government shut down, rebels everywhere, people started killed each other for some decades and then slowly rebuilt the society. It's literally the cycle of history.

Did I mention it always happened when the leaders were out of touch with reality, the bureaucrats were most corrupt, distribution of wealth was most polarized and people were least optimistic? Must be familiar.

This kind of topics have nothing to do with the survival of human civilization as a whole, but the selfish desire of people to continue their existence until they eventually and unavoidably turn into corpse. What's our value now but to produce garbage and CO2 and cut down trees used to sustain environment? Zero. What would we do to better a post-collapse society world? Nothing. So, we can just accept the fate and die, and let others live. It is of course biased since the ones here have better chance of survival than those who don't even have Internet or water, but you know how it works.

Anyway, the next generation will always end up better. 100 years, 1000 years, makes no difference in the history of civilization. After all, who could have imagined our modern world when the Roman empire collapsed? What if they never did? We might be far worse now.

[conon394]

2. transitioning to (unfortunately unhealthy) GM food that can survive draughts and heat one year and then floods and ice the next year, etc. Diversification and protection of the food sources we have and trying to keep Food security that is already being threatened by climate change. I hate the idea that I would have to feed on GMO and die from cancer at 65 and my kids having a much increased chance to have three arms. But I dislike starvation more and this is where we are at this point.

What are you babbling about there is nothing wrong GMO crops - you will be fine thay do not cause cancer outside of the imagination of people know who little to nothing about modern plant breeding or previously;y modern plant breeding that is now a bit archaic except it does get people knickers in a twist because its not called GMO.

[Love Mountain]

Check this article.
In short, the article says that the transition to Green Energy that can sustain our current way of life and de-coupling from oil will take 50-100 years at our current production capabilities (we need copper for cables, we need materials for turbines etc). And we do not have 50-100 years. The Green Energy myth is dangerous. Not because we don't need Green Energy but because it is a case of "too little, too late".
And no, it is NOT a pro-oil article.

His math is wrong.

Also, it's just arguing against a strawman. Yeah, some people want only green energy, but what you can do, and what I've seen many people argue for, is that you can simply use carbon-based energy sources for "baseload" power. That way you don't have to turn reactors on or off. But yeah, Michaux's math is off, I've never heard of him before, but I recognize some of the figures he quoted in the video, because I've seen them brought up in battery debates. There is more than enough Lithium, many times over. Lithium production alone went from roughly 25,000 tons in 2010 to over 130,000 today. Why? Because Tesla Model S. Michaux's paper was interesting, but his project was far too ambitious to just get away with some basic math.

It also doesn't account for technological progress. In 10-15 years, Sodium-Ion batteries might be the most used battery for grid storage. Or perhaps it'll be something completely different like Ambri's liquid metal batteries.

Now, alhoon's take on the "We should make drastic changes and we should do them now" is:

1. we should go for rapid and steep power cost increase, with government support for the poor to be able to afford it but with heavy hits for luxuries. Heated pools? AC 10 Celcius (18F) below outside temperature? LoL. Energy for those things should be extremely expensive. Recycling aluminium instead of the energy-intensive production.

Energy is already expensive in Europe. Fact is, what we need is more technology, not less. There are solutions available to reduce energy consumption.

Heat pumps are three times more efficient than gas heating. You can use the savings from not buying expensive natural gas to subsidizing heat pumps for consumers...

Energy production itself has a ton of waste.

Know how much energy you waste today? Two thirds of it.



See that big grey area called "rejected energy"? That's basically how much energy we waste by doing things like converting energy from kinetic to heat or electric and so on. A lot of this can be fixed by simply using Electricity for things like transportation or heat.

4. A strong (and I mean strong) global reaction to China and India, to force them to stop polluting like crazy, explaining to them that "sorry, we know it sucks for you that you will not be able to afford the standard of living we got in the west in the polluting years, but if you keep doing that, we will all die."

China has more renewable energy than Europe and United States combined, or close to it. It was around there.

5. Focus on mining what we need to make a quick transition to renewable energy. Increase the mines world-wide. Low population, metal-rich countries (Canada, Russia, Australia) should rump up mining. Open more mines. Many more. Bring in workers from poor countries, train them, and send them to the mines. Open more mineral resources universities (or hire the Greek ones, the majority of which work on other fields because we don't have mines for the engineers we produce).
And when opening mines, focus on humans-first policies.
Again, sucks for some Cariboo in Canada that their entire ecosystem will have to go away and they will become extinct, but it is either the Cariboo or us and the Cariboo at this point.
Tree-huggers can keep the DNA of those Cariboo and clone them in the future, after we survive as a species.

This doom and gloom is ridiculous. Transition to a green future is perfectly viable. Adding Windmills and solar panels is cheaper than fossil fuels. The economics are already there. What we should be really concerned about, is industrial applications. You can't replace fossil fuels for planes, or ships, or long-haul trucking. You need it for tractors, you need it for fertilizer, you need it for lots of different things that you cannot easily replace with electricity-based power.

But some of the "panic" from the skeptic camp is just a reverse-reaction to Greta Thunberg, it's just a bad reactionary take.

[BlizzieM]

This doom and gloom is ridiculous. Transition to a green future is perfectly viable. Adding Windmills and solar panels is cheaper than fossil fuels. The economics are already there. What we should be really concerned about, is industrial applications. You can't replace fossil fuels for planes, or ships, or long-haul trucking. You need it for tractors, you need it for fertilizer, you need it for lots of different things that you cannot easily replace with electricity-based power.

Indeed, this is completely true, and in fact something we could've done already. Unfortunately the reason we haven't, as pointed out in this video from Second Thought, that the practically free energy is actually bad for business, and as it stands, if any energy company did a complete change over to the renewable energies, their profit margins would crash because profits from the practically free energy aren't all that great in the grand scheme of things, and it's sadly more beneficial to keep dumping CO2 to the atmosphere.

I wouldn't say it's doom and gloom mind, but frankly, it would need a very dedicated mass movement to turn the tide since it's not going to happen on it's own.

[alhoon]

His math is wrong.

I hope you are right. Although my own sources have independently come to the same conclusions (see below).

But... keep in mind Dr. Michaux (in personal discussions and in his papers and his suggestions to the Finnish government) more or less comes to the same conclusion as you do:
If we want to do this thing, we need more technology.

Considering he is working on research projects he wants a lot, a lot more funds to develop said technology. And he sees a lethargic EU that drags its feet. EU as I have said in previous threads (and as Dr. M says in other papers and interviews) is too focused on "let's try to slow down climate change"... when climate change is already here. Cutting emissions by 50% by 2050? LoL. That's nothing. That's not enough.
Thus, with our current and projected capabilities we do not have the time to mine what we need.
What I mean is:

Adding Windmills and solar panels is cheaper than fossil fuels.

OF COURSE it is. But we are not doing it fast enough!!!! That is his point.
And do it faster, we need to mine the poop out of copper to make thousands of miles of cable. We need craploads of iron to build windmills. And with our current productions we will need several decades to mine those resources.
We absolutely can mine them in 10 years if we put our heads down and get to it. The issue that Dr. Micheaux wants to bring is we do not do that. We keep trying to sloooowwwwly cut emissions in Europe, while China increases their CO2 production by 2 tons for each ton we cut!

No, we have run out of time. Because we are stupid and greedy. Not because there are no solutions. It is time to look for mitigation because I do not expect the governments of the world to suddenly come to their senses and do the freaking transition within 10 years.
I had a talk with Dr. M, and he told me the Fin minister he talked with, had not even considered that they have to import a lot of iron, copper etc to reach the windpower goals they have. And keep in mind that was in 2021. Before the embargos to Russia.


PS. You have never heard of him before because he's a professor in a uni in Finland. I know him because I worked with him.

[conon394]

@Alhoon

Sorry if I was rude. But I am baffled that you believe you get cancer from GMO can explain your reasoning. I hope you don't also think your kids will get cancer form GMO cotton. But really why the fear>

[alhoon]

@Alhoon

Sorry if I was rude. But I am baffled that you believe you get cancer from GMO can explain your reasoning. I hope you don't also think your kids will get cancer form GMO cotton. But really why the fear>

Not just from GMO food but from all mass-produced crap that is so full of hormones to grow quickly etc. Many of the mutations of USA GMOs are there so that the mutated plants could survive with even more hormones.
But this is not about GMO. Feel free to open a thread about GMO and I will tell you all about my reservations. But if you want the short version:
Suspicion and mistrust of GMO food. I believe they are bad for my health. It is also not rooted in logic. I.e. you will be hard pressed to convince me to change my deeply rooted mistrust of GMO as it doesn't come from me reading stuff. The discussions with similarly-uninformed people around me, have convinced me they are bad. Articles they are not? I would not believe nor I would probably not read.

[conon394]

Not just from GMO food but from all mass-produced crap that is so full of hormones to grow quickly etc. Many of the mutations of USA GMOs are there so that the mutated plants could survive with even more hormones.
But this is not about GMO. Feel free to open a thread about GMO and I will tell you all about my reservations. But if you want the short version:
Suspicion and mistrust of GMO food. I believe they are bad for my health. It is also not rooted in logic. I.e. you will be hard pressed to convince me to change my deeply rooted mistrust of GMO as it doesn't come from me reading stuff. The discussions with similarly-uninformed people around me, have convinced me they are bad. Articles they are not? I would not believe nor I would probably not read.

If you don't mind waiting I will give it a go sometime maybe later in month in I suppose the Political and Scientific Academy. Can re post your quote as a starting point? Plus I need a little time to brows around the web and get a feel for the current panic points are.

[alhoon]

If you don't mind waiting I will give it a go sometime maybe later in month in I suppose the Political and Scientific Academy. Can re post your quote as a starting point? Plus I need a little time to brows around the web and get a feel for the current panic points are.

Yes, you can repost mine, but: -it is not a recent panic. I have the same opinion for the past 15 years. -You will need more than my post as a starting point.