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.
Oopsy.
But it works in the movies 🎥🎥🎥!!!!
C’mon man!!!!!!
btt
This is only true if one uses the 8 billion world population figures.
But, if one does the same math for 500 million...
Onward, to the planet Voltron for all of our mineral needs.
Have we reached peak lithium?
Global Warming, Global Cooling, Overpopulation, Fossil fuels to run out 1970’s, and on, and on. At least this one came with a BOMBSHELL. So I know its real.:)
I might be wrong. But I don’t think anyone is allowed to do the math anymore.
They don’t intend to have to replace them.
Deep States, plural, don’t care.
This is about restricting driving, not saving the planet.
We know there is no way this Net Zero will come close to replacing the energy currently produced from fossil fuels. The only option is dramatic cuts in demand. The Net Zero Puritans will make sure nobody has personal transportation, limitations on electrical illumination, restrictions on residential climate controls, and you will eat food made from bugs and like it. The Net Zero Puritans, being the Elect, will exempt themselves from such sacrifices.
Until then, petroleum.
5.56mm
Nope, the whole idea is to turn humanity into slave populations in cities, dependant on the government for their daily ration of worms and insects. Nobody but the rich elites will have motor transport.
It’s seems like every day, more and more nonsense comes out about these disasters. From the fires to the costs of repairs to kids in Africa mining the materials.
Maybe there’s some ulterior motive for Musk wanting Twitter so bad. Maybe he knows that these things will soon become dinosaurs. But, he’ll milk every penny he can out of every white, liberal hipster with his $30k Tesla, sell a few of the high end ones to the wealthy, but at the end of the day, quietly bow out or sell off his shares to some sucker.
Of course, for the EV-nerds on here, and there are quite a few, they’ll be talking about their electric Tesla’s and BMWs and 1200hp EVs with a gagillion ft/lbs of torque and how the cars can 400 miles on a full charge but you can only charge the battery 60-70% so you really, only get around 240-280 miles and then have to wait for a charging station or upgrade your existing electric in your home.
Scary thought but it sure would explain a lot of things.
Scary thought but it sure would explain a lot of things.
We also need planet AMPTRON..................
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.