Posted on 10/25/2022 9:18:54 AM PDT by Red Badger
Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience climate scares and investing in impracticable green technologies. Until the lights start to go out and heating fails, they are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux. Referring to the U.K.’s 2050 Net Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target”.
https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf
To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.
All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.
Michaux sounds a clear warning message. Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build. It was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit and seemingly unlimited mineral resources. The replacement, he notes, needs to be done when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt and not enough minerals. Most challenging of all, it has to be done within a few decades. Based on his copious calculations, the author is of the opinion that it will not go fully “as planned”.
Last Sunday, Sir David Attenborough concluded six episodes of pseudoscientific green agitprop Frozen Planet II by demanding that the world embrace Net Zero, “no matter how challenging it may be”. Net Zero is a political command-and-control project, the full horror of which is yet to be inflicted on the general population. Michaux is quite clear what it entails: “What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.”
Of course, a radically different system of government is available in the People’s Republic of China, but here the position on Net Zero is a tad more nuanced. Having lifted about a billion people out of starving poverty in the last 40 years and become the workshop for an increasingly complacent western world – all powered by fossil fuel – the cause does not seem so pressing. Speaking to the Communist Party Congress earlier this week, President Xi Jinping sounded a note of caution and said “prudence” would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero-out carbon emissions. All of this would be in line with the principle of “getting the new before discarding the old”.
Meanwhile, China’s coal production is reported to have reached record levels, while the Congress was told that oil and gas exploration will be expanded as part of measures to ensure “energy security”.
Michaux points out that nearly 85% of world energy comes from fossil fuel. By his calculations, the annual global capacity of non-fossil electrical power will need to quadruple to 37,670.6 TWh. In a recent report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Professor Michael Kelly estimates that the U.K. electricity grid would have to expand by 2.7 times. This will involve adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years. If calculations are made for the need to rewire homes, streets, local substations and powerlines to carry the new capacity, the extra cost will be nearly £1 trillion.
In another recent GWPF paper, the energy writer John Constable warned that the European Green Deal seems all but certain to break Europe’s economic and socio-political power, “rendering it a trivial and incapable backwater, reliant on – and subservient to – superior powers”.
History provides us with many examples of weak, or weakened, tribes being overrun by stronger tribes. In the animal kingdom it is known as natural evolution. A 96-year old ‘national treasure’ preaches we have to pay any price to satisfy the new cult of the green god. Better costed and more rational views are available.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Fossil fuels may be renewable, we have coal and derive thorium from it to build Thorium Reactors.
We don’t want to follow “that” kind of science!
“Doesn’t solve the problem of supply and don’t forget all the copper needed to expand the grid, there isn’t enough.”
Despite an ever-increasing demand for copper, there is more of the metal available today than at any other time in history. This, together with the ability to infinitely recycle copper, means that society is extremely unlikely to deplete the copper supply, and copper will continue to contribute to global initiatives, like the SDGs and clean energy.
https://copperalliance.org/sustainable-copper/about-copper/cu-demand-long-term-availability/
Let me give you an example. For England to covert to total EV use by 2030, expanding the grid, etc., it is estimated they would need the entire worlds output for a year.
So for California you might be talking several years. There isn’t enough for that demand.
“Let me give you an example. For England to covert to total EV use by 2030, “
Irrelevant. England is not going to convert to total EV by 2030.
Yes, but they mandated to do it whether they can or not.
btw — I don’t live in New England no more. Been in Florida for 16 years !
they showed the new electric pickups can haul 5-10 thousand pound loads for only about 100 miles between charges.
500 million is the target for the vaxxers causing infertility and heart problems, ask Gates
That’s fine for copper, but what about the others? Can they be feasibly recycled yet?
Clean energy, as it’s euphemistically called, is fine for supplemental power, but otherwise, it can go stick a sock in itself.
How come the Finns can do this research and our elites are totally effing useless?
“That’s fine for copper, but what about the others? Can they be feasibly recycled yet?”
Which. others?
Lithium? Plenty
Cobalt? Tesla is using cobalt-free batteries
“Clean energy, as it’s euphemistically called, is fine for supplemental power, but otherwise, it can go stick a sock in itself.”
Non Sequitur
Welcome to Florida... glad you’re here. 16 years makes you an old timer...
The Finns aren’t part of the $CAM...................
Exactly so. It’s not like used oil, plastics, glass, iron, copper and aluminum that take minimal amounts of energy as compared to mining the raw materials to reclaim................
The supply of child slaves to dig the raw materials out of the ground with their bare hands is also limited.
“Oil is generated from former living organisms which are finite in quantity.”
That’s the most popular theory. But I’ve never seen anyone explain the chemical process that turned a dead tree or dead dinosaur into complex hydrocarbons, let alone duplicate it under laboratory conditions.
Let’s do some math. Math is fun!
A barrel of oil weighs about 300 pounds. Worldwide daily consumption is around 90,000,000 barrels a day. That comes out to roughly 27 Billion pounds a day. Now multiply that times 80 years.
The biomass needed to produce just what we have found so far simply never existed. It would require that every living thing that’s ever been on the planet be magically turned directly into oil.
Then there’s the not insignificant problem of explaining how all those dead trees and dinosaurs ended up 20 or 30 thousand feet underground. The Saudis have, or had, a well that’s over 9 MILES deep. How did those dinosaurs get that far down? What geological process did that?
The fact is that we simply don’t know for sure how oil is produced by the Earth.
L
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