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.
Don’t worry. We can just grow potatoes and use potato batteries.
Oh wait, we can’t use nitrogen fertilizer to grow those potatoes. Hmm....
I want to move to Planet Resistron.
“But, if one does the same math for 500 million...”
If you’re going to do that, then we might as well keep using petroleum.
No foolin? Politicians forgot to check that out? Yet politicians still prattle on about the benefits of... what exactly?
Well there is an abundant supply of unobtainium. We just can’t get it. Yet.
I have believed for some time that catalytic conversion of safely stored hydrogen is the answer for clean transportation engine technology. EVs using heavy storage batteries were never an answer.
Plus, think of all the Soylent Green one can make from 7.5 billion people - we may never have to eat bugs again!
Post #25.
” But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered.”
Tesla is using Cobalt-free batteries.
“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.””
New batteries have a 20+ year life. Tesla is working on a battery that has an even greater lifetime.
They better keep some rig workers around in that 500 million number. 🤔😂✌
“but you can only charge the battery 60-70% “
False.
“Nobody but the rich elites will have motor transport.”
To where? Country outings? Hahaha
Fuel cells can power electric cars also.
They still run out of it eventually. Unlike hydrocarbons which are generated deep in the mantle and migrate up to where they are accessible.
Nowhere do you see the words "nuclear" or "fusion."
The Finnish report says "Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build."
I've been making this argument to people for probably ten years -- you just cannot throw away a highly optimized, extremely complex energy system that grew and improved gradually since 1882 with a new system in a couple of decades. It just simply cannot be done.
I spent three-quarters of my career in the electric power industry and know what it takes to make small improvements. The notion of just trashing that entire system and replacing it overnight with a green wet dream is absolutely ludicrous.
I am very glad to see articles and reports such as these finally getting some traction and just beginning to counter the idiotic green claims.
That said, fossil fuels are no doubt a limited resource and only nuclear power can replace them. You will need an energy storage medium for vehicles that doesn't require lithium or cobalt. Converting nuclear energy to liquid fuels will probably make the most sense, but that requires carbon from coal which is a finite resource. That leaves hydrogen.
But this is a problem that will unfold over the coming centuries. There is no need to implement a solution today.
That's wrong. That's the sales pitch, but no one seriously believes that the "renewable" "green" economy will ever be able to replace the standard of living the developed world currently enjoys, let alone allow the third world to rise to those levels. Rather, the hope is that this new economy will somehow provide a soft landing as the first world descends to engery consumption levels roughly equivalent to the developing world, but about 20 years ago.
They just hope you won't notice before it's too late.
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