What does the “battle for the world’s ENVIRONMENTAL survival” even mean?
Here’s the rundown to piss off all sides:
Global warming is happening. It’s at least somewhat anthropogenic.
But the real battle is over the globe warming two degrees. Most of the warming would be in polar and subpolar regions. Most would be in local winter. Most would be at night. Hot summer days won’t be much hotter. Cold winter nights will be much warmer. This may introduce pests and health issues that Europe and Northern America aren’t used to. The net result of global warming would be fewer destructive storms, not more. The sea levels would rise a foot or so, mostly through adiobatic expansion (liquids expand when they heat up). Sea ice will decline, but even the complete elimination of all sea ice an ice shelves won’t raise sea levels one inch. The maps they show of sea level rise are based on the complete melting of Antarctica, which would require temperatures raising 100 degrees for 10,000 years.
50 years of lies about the feasibility of solar power make this hard to believe, but we’ve finally reached the point where solar power really does make sense economically. Subsidizing unfeasible “green” technology has delayed this, by robbing demand from feasible technology. EVs are incredibly more efficient than gas-powered engines, even given the presently higher price and cost of distributing electricity. EVs are about to get a LOT cheaper. They will dominate the car market with or without government intervention. There will long be a sizeable niche for gas-powered vehicles, and for dual-technology vehicles; this niche presently includes vacation and business travel, but not for long. EVs run on electricity, of which 60% is generated by carbon, but nearly all growth in power production will be “green.”
Earth will not run out of Lithium in the foreseeable future. New reserves will be found, new extraction and refinement techniques will make more of what has been found economically recoverable. And Lithium is not depleted by usage; if the price of Lithium goes high enough, lithium recycling becomes economically feasible.
Lithium extraction and refinement is not clean. Neither are any other industrial processes. Its harms are unique, but it’s not uniquely harmful.
Also, the conversion of our economy to solar and wind power is happening incredibly faster than any government projections ever predicted. Current projections would require a MASSIVE divestment away from these technologies to occur. Coal is absolutely dead. We probably will be 80% reliant on solar and wind power within 20 years. Last year, the market share for renewable energy grew 3%. I don’t mean that renewable energy grew by 3%, which would mean that at the current rate of growth, renewable energy could barely keep up with increased demand, if at all. Rather, I mean that its market share grew so fast that within 33 years, even at a linear growth rate, it would reach 100%.
Uh, you really think electricity will get cheaper, after ALL costs are considered, going green?
That would require an enormous breakthrough in storage technology. Yeah, fabulous new batteries with wonderful reliability are just around the corner — for the last few decades. I’ll just say I’m “from Missouri” and will believe it when large scale production has proven itself for a few years.
Then the cost of the grid rebuild has to be included too. Heck, we haven’t even made much progress in hardening it against the next Carrington Event.
I may be a bit prejudiced too, because I believe in not putting all my eggs in one basket. Several years back we had a massive ice storm. My family was luckier than most, as we only had two extended periods without any power, and numerous shorter periods. (Feeds from two different lines on our property, and I have a couple long heavy extension cords.) But, just up the road from us, people were running generators 3 weeks later. I had a 5000w generator that really got a workout. But no way could it have additionally handled charging an EV.
Anyway, once the roads were marginally safe, whenever we got down to ~10 gallons of gasoline, I’d make a run to town to get more gas. The gas station had a generator to run the pumps, inside lights, registers, etc. The supply of gas to the station was via trucks running on diesel.
If our entire energy infrastructure had been electric, we’d have been in deep trouble. Perhaps we could have escaped in an EV on the 3rd or 4th day, but we’d have lost most of the plumbing in the house, the well, and most of our animals. That gasoline / diesel infrastructure was our lifeline.
EV’s are BS, like your post.