Comments not related to oil or natural gas production in this thread please, thanks.
138 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum October 4, 2024”
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Comments not related to oil or natural gas production in this thread please, thanks.
Comments are closed.
Hideaway
One of your last comments in the last thread focused on entropy and the general direction it inevitably pushes activities like mining. This felt more similar to some of the points that T. Murphy (Do the Math) regularly makes, and I think a large part of the difference is the underlying timeframe assumption. Murphy explicitly defines his required timeframe for looking at the sustainability (or not) of ‘modernity’. He cites 1,000,000 years plus or minus an order of magnitude. FWIW, your comments about entropy in the last thread are more compelling within this type of context than the regular arguments you make here. That said, I admit to having a hard time wrapping my head around this type of planning horizon and still see plenty of opportunities on the scale of 10s or 100s of years.
I’m sure that long-term analyses and projections for 1,000,000 years from now have some value for basic science, as the start of finding something that might be meaningful. But it seems incredibly unlikely that such projections, at this point, could have any practical value at all.
Average ore grades of copper have declined by 50% in the last 30 years, so thinking the problem is a million years away is not accurate.
The economics of today will have most new copper mines, that are certainly required by the ‘green transition’, be operated with diesel fuel in remote locations. Sure they will all put up some solar/wind etc, but only for a fraction of the mining, but batteries not so much, with diesel able to power the mine 100% when needed. The solar and wind added to the cost of capital machinery needed at the mine site.
It’s not just ore grades either. Waste strip ratios are rising, ore hardness index getting higher (more energy needed to crush the ore), deposits deeper on average (we’ve already mined the easy near surface stuff), the grind size is also getting smaller to liberate the smaller sized metal grains in the rock of lower ore grades.
This is one complex system that gets hand waved away in statements like ”there is plenty of copper left”, without people bothering to do the calculations on what it will take to extract it, refine it, and bring it to civilization.
Multiply this by thousands for every metal and mineral, then add a world of declining energy availability that’s coming ‘soon’, all while remembering that net energy from existing cheap easy sources is being lowered all the time.
What happens when gross energy availability falls, while net energy continues to fall much faster, because of declining resources of oil, gas, and coal??
I keep trying to simplify the problem for people because of the high overall complexity takes hundreds of pages to put it all together..
The simple reality is no-one is building new Aluminium smelters based upon solar, wind and batteries only off grid (to save on grid connect fees!!), but they are building new Aluminium smelters based on just new coal fired power stations.
It would clearly be the opposite if solar, wind and batteries were if fact cheaper forms of power as we constantly get told, and research paper after research paper ‘show’. The narrative doesn’t match the reality of what’s actually happening in the real world.
The world as a whole has had advantages in economies of scale by having massive factories in certain places making goods for the whole world, computer chips from Taiwan being the perfect example. This incredible scale and the complexity relies totally on fossil fuels feeding it, more energy and more materials. We need both.
At some point soon there simply wont be the required energy available, so the complexity has to unwind. We can’t go and build 50 factories around the world, making the chips that one use to, as that takes more energy and materials than just one efficient one. When the energy shortage affects the material availability as it must, everything on average becomes much less complex as existing systems suffer from entropy and have no replacements.
All sorts of ‘economies of scale’ we have built the modern globalised world upon unravel due to lack of new parts needed, which has feedback loops on the gathering of energy and materials. The whole concept of we’ll build more XYZ or whatever is thinking stuck in the paradigm of the last 250 years when there was always ‘MORE’ energy and materials available to build anything. New investment becomes prohibitively expensive in a world of severe competition for all resources as people try and survive today as food also becomes much harder to obtain.
The whole concept of build more renewables, batteries, nuclear, means an acceleration in the use of the last fossil fuels, building more of all the underlying systems necessary for the provision of all the extra materials needed, raising the background level of energy use in all the new environmentally destructive mining that needs to happen, to provide the metals and minerals…
Even among all the rhetoric around the ‘green transition’, there are never any calculations about how the products we get from fossil fuels will happen when they have left us due to depletion. It’s always “technology will save us”, never any actual numbers reflecting reality…
Perhaps you should read an essay from Prof Jem Bendall about the lies of the green energy fairytale…
https://jembendell.com/2024/08/25/the-nine-lies-of-the-fake-green-fairytale/
Hey Hideaway (& Nick)
I’ll try to clarify my prior post and respond to yours in part as well. In the prior post I pointed out Murphy’s argument that for modernity to be truly sustainable it has to be able to demonstrate it can exist for something like 1,000,000 years. The point I was trying to make was that Hideways prior post with a focus on entropy came closer to successfully making his (Hideaways) apparent argument within this type of extended context than the indonesian smelter argument Hideaway regularly repeats. If one were to accept the bar that Murphy sets, entropy all by itself makes it hard to argue for success.
Hideaway only,
You don’t need to “simplify the problem” for me or, I suspect, virtually anyone on this site.
I read the essay from Prof. Jem Bendall. Not impressed. He sets up a straw man argument of 9 lies that are just silly in their extreme positions, at least for any of the regulars on this site.
Yes, ore grades have declined. Yes, net energy from fossil fuels is headed towards decline. Yes, there are limits to growth. Yes, modernity and the lifestyle in OECD countries is a complex system facing some immediate and real challenges. Yes, these challenges pale in immediate comparison to what a great many other people on this planet deal with daily. I can’t imagine any of this is news to regular readers on this site.
However, it seems like you (and Bendalls essay) are arguing against some fictional opponent singing Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. Please.
You suggest that…”It’s always ‘technology will save us’, never any actual numbers reflecting reality…” Others on this site have responded to your arguments with actual numbers that you don’t always seem to acknowledge.
More importantly, a great number of people spend a great deal of their time working on improving future outcomes. And, more than a few of them use ‘actual numbers’ to do so. Their work will likely yield NOT some simple binary win/lose, but will instead provide some continuum of results that range from actually harmful to those that provide great benefit. Giving up is not an option I’m interested in.
To avoid being one of those people you complain about not citing any actual numbers, I will point back to one particular aspect of the complex system(s) under discussion. Specifically, population. While simplistic, the ‘I=PAT’ concept helps illustrate how important this variable is. I’ll also define the timeframe as now to 2100.
On this site, Dennis has often shown forecast, normalized per capita energy availability this century based on specific population projections showing a significant drop in global population through 2100. I have also commented on the recent work done by others reinforcing this, with forecasts that show a mid-century peak and population at 2100 half or less of the UN-median forecast (11B+) that is a common benchmark. If true, this type of reversal of population growth is certain to have dramatic impacts on the very matters you argue.
I have a new website, please check it out. This link opens on the video page: Or you can just type in the address “AWiderChoice.com”
A Wider Choice
The first video is a one-minute video bout my book. The second video I interview my son Rusty. The video is 20 minutes long. I am disappointed with this interview; it does not play right and the sound in not good. I am going to take id down in about a month or so. I will have a new video coming out about once a month, or perhaps more often.
The book can be found here:
A Wider Choice
There is also a blog blog section where you can leave comments. The first blog is just the first chapter of my book and I did not write the other two, the publisher of the book wrote them. I am going to take them both down in a month or so and and add a new blog about once a month. If you have any comments you can leave them in the comments section of the blog posts. Or you can post me direct at Darwinian200@gmail.com
Ron Pattersson
Darwinian200@gmail.com
Hi Ron,
I am 8 minutes into the debate/discussion with your son. I am surprised he conceded the point consciousness is not material. It is material, that is why chemicals like psychedelics and alcohol affect the states of consciousness. There is biochemical and electrical interactions which alters our state of perception. So it has to be material.
I am not a materialist. I have my own distinct views on this topic. I would define your world view as some what Kantian. Kantian philosophy is interesting as it overlaps with eastern philosophical views. Quantum mechanical experiments, in my view prove Kant is correct. Specifically quantum entanglement aka spooky action at a distance. Bohr showed Kantian philosophy to be correct (in my view), which is space-time and causality is a consequence of consciousness.
In other words space, time and causality is a priori to experience ‘objects of consciousness’. Space and time probably does not exist beyond consciousness. Schopenhauer extends Kants philosophy in his great work the world as will and representation. Which if i was to summarise in a couple of sentences would be:
Evolution makes us see the world in a very specific way through the senses and the brain. And that representation which we call “reality” is actually as Vedic indian philosophy calls it, is Maya, or illusion.
In Buddhist philosophy the end of Maya comes with the ending of consciousness which parallels my own views. Which would explain some NDEs.
Just my 2 cents Ill listen to the rest.
Mike, thanks for the reply. I think my son misspoke when he indicated that consciousness was not material. He has told me many times that it was definitely material. However, I think you are misled by the point that chemicals affect consciousness. Of course they do. Chemicals affect the brain and the brain, in life, affects consciousness. It is only on very rare occasions where the brain is disconnected from consciousness, as in near-death experiences.
If my philosophy is like that of some other philosopher or mystic, that is a mere coincidence. I formed my own worldview based on reason, logic, evidence, common sense, and absolutely nothing else. I have never read anyone that I agree with one hundred percent. I don’t believe in karma, which is a kind of tit for tat. I think that is nonsense. Of course, most people would say that what I believe is nonsense as well. That is because they have a worldview that encompasses their ideology. My philosophy tells me that an ideology makes one stupid. That is a belief that was acquired from their environment, either their parents, teachers, or peers. An ideology is something, like their religion, or materialism, or even idealism that they will not give up no matter what. It is immune from reason, logic, evidence, or even common sense. All my beliefs about the world or nature are held tentatively, as what I think is “most probable.” I will examine any and all evidence to the contrary and will turn on a dime if the evidence indicates they are wrong.
A person with an ideology will not even consider evidence to the contrary to his/her belief but will consume every bit of conformation bias he/she can lay their hands on.
Anyway, thanks for the post.
Thanks Ron,
Ill shoot you an email to continue the convo.
No consciousness is not material, consciousness is totally spiritual. If I eat 400 mg of mescaline my body gains 400 mg of mass nothing more nothing less. The 400 mg of mescaline changes my biochemical environment not my consciousness. Drugs aren’t that special, don’t let the shamans fool you!
I’ve been following Ron since “The Oil Drum” days. (Darwinian).
I was like this guy is super smart and precise evidenced based logic.
I had him pegged for an Atheist.
When I read his first book, I was shocked that he was a Mystic.
I am a materialist, but Ron got me thinking.
Well worth the read!!!!!!
Andre, I have identified myself as an atheist all my adult life. And I still do because the term means non-theist. And I am definitely a non-theist. Theism means religion and an atheist is a person who don’t believe in religion. Well, that is if we take the literal definition of the word, and I do. I don’t consider myself a mystic either, though I do believe the overwhelming evidence supports the concept that the non-material world exists. My opinions are based on reason, logic, evidence, and common sense and absolutely nothing else. I don’t have faith in anything because faith means belief without evidence.
Materialism is a faith because there is no evidence that there nothing exists outside the material world. Materialist, that is the YouTube internet materialist who call themselves “skeptics” are not skeptics, they are deniers. They refuse to examine the evidence because they say it is impossible for non-material evidence to exist so why waste time looking for it.
Simple observation- Thought, yours and mine, happens.
And it is clearly an element of the non-material world.
But without the material world….blood flow and chemical reactions to name a bit of it,
there is no thought.
Nothingness.
It’s not clear to me what non-material is even supposed to mean. It’s worth mentioning that software is non-material in the sense that it weighs zero.
For example, I can download software over the internet. It adds new capabilities to my machine but does not add any weight to it at all.
Software does create capabilities but using it requires expenditure of energy which is not “non-material”.
Alim,
I believe it does add mass in terms of m = E/c^2. It’s obviously tiny or negligible, but its not zero. Most would be electron mass i assume ~ 9.31 x 10^-31 kg.
JJHMAN —
True, but then consciousness doesn’t seem to work very well (as far as I know) on non-living matter, and life costs energy.
IRONMIKE —
Adding software to a machine means storing it, typically on an SSD drive. This means changing the pattern of zeroes and ones on the drive, but no net addition to the amount of energy.
Alim,
I believe the 1s have mass in terms of electrons trapped in floating gate transistors (specifically for ssd). I do believe a full ssd drive would weigh more than an empty one. Infinitesimally.
I am assuming an ’empty’ ssd would be mostly 0s of course, but this could be a wrong assumption.
IRON MIKE
I was assuming the initial state of the SSD was random, so about half zeroes and half ones. There is no reason to assume that the ratio of zeroes to ones would change when software was introduced.
Also SSDs are almost always encrypted. The encryption algorithm is likely to keep the ratio of zeroes to ones at about 1:1. Well maybe not, but the final 1 count shouldn’t correlate with the 1 count of the raw data if the algorithm is any good.
Guys, you are missing the point. A materialist is someone who believes nothing exist except the material world. That is matter and energy. A materialist does not believe in telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or any type of PSI whatsoever. He/she also does not believe in any type of superior intelligence or god like thing. He/she does not believe souls exist.
I am not a materialist because I believe there is a source of all that exist. I cannot accept the materialist concept that the universe just popped out of nothing. I have read Lawrence Krauss’s book “A Universe from Nothing,” twice. It is a very stupid book and has been panned by dozens of physicists and philosophers.
Materialism is an ideology like religion. Materialism is not a religion but is believed as if it is. That is, once you have found truth one need to seek no further because valid evidence to the contrary cannot possibly exist.
I don’t “believe” in materialism. I just accept it because I have never seen or experienced anything else.
There are lots of books by cosmologists offering explanations of how the universe may have come into being. I’m just finishing one now called “Until the End Of Time”. It describes a possible beginning and some possible endings of the physical plane. I appreciate that the author does not claim certainty, just how he sees the evidence. The material is interesting, nothing more. Nothing here to “believe”.
In my youth I spent a lot of time trying to understand the cosmos in terms of the world’s religions and concluded that non-materialist descriptions are less credible than physics and that neither quantum physics, religion nor the kinds of phenomena you mention above have any relevance to my life. Most seem to demand “belief”. I guess I have stopped seeking but not because I have found truth but because materialism works and I have found no evidence that non-material phenomena is either interesting or relevant to my remaining years.
JJ, I don’t believe in a damn thing that is not supported by evidence. No one should just “believe” anything that is not supported by evidence.
On the other hand, because you should never “not believe” simply because you have never seen any evidence. It is most probable that you have never examined the evidence for anything you choose not to believe. You look instead for confirmation bias to support what you already believe or disbelieve. Confirmation bias locks you into a belief system. Materialism is a belief system, an ideology. Just watch all the “debunking videos” and read all the “debunking books and articles” for your ideology and be secure in the absolute certainty that your ideology of materialism is correct. That way you live with absolute certainty of your belief system for the rest of your life.
But above all, never read anything, or listen to any evidence contrary to your ideology of materialism. That could lead to cognitive dissidence. Read only articles, books, or watch videos that confirm your ideology. You can sleep a lot better if you do that.
“ A materialist does not believe in telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or any type of PSI whatsoever. He/she also does not believe in any type of superior intelligence”
Scientists are perfectly open to telepathy, ufos, extraterrestrials, etc. The problem is that they’ve been thoroughly investigated and so far there’s never been anything credible.
Scientists are dying to find extraterrestrial, greater intelligence- they’ve got powerful radio telescopes looking even as we speak.
Scientists are perfectly open to telepathy, ufos, extraterrestrials, etc.
Nick, I am sorry to say this but you obviously have no clue as to what the hell you ae talking about. We are talking about materialism, not ufos, extraterrestrials, bigfoot or any other stilly thing you might dream up.
What you don’t understand is that only about half of scientists are materialist. Science does not investigate the non-material world. Science deals with physics, not metaphysics. However, that being said, many scientists are interested in consciousness and believe it is non-material. Many scientists believe that the double-slit experiment proves that matter is non-material, a wave, when it passes through both slits at one time. And even though it has nothing to do with physics, many scientists have investigated telepathy, and even the thousands of cases of near near-death experiences and found them genuine.
So you should be more careful when you say what “scientists” believe unless you have intereview every scientist alive. Many scientists are not materialists.
Edit: When I googled: “What percentage of scientist are materialist?” I got this reply:
While there’s no definitive, recent, large-scale survey to pinpoint an exact percentage, based on available research, a significant majority of scientists, particularly in the natural sciences, would likely be considered materialists, with estimates suggesting that over 50% adhere to a materialistic worldview, meaning they believe everything, including consciousness, can be explained by physical matter and processes.
Okay, so the percentage may be slightly over 50%, but not by a lot.
Ron,
First you disrespect my comment, then you agree with it!
We agree that scientists are open to investigating things they don’t yet understand, like telepathy, wave vs particle paradoxes, higher intelligence, near-death experiences, etc.
Many of them are skeptical, of course, of what you describe as non-material.
Personally, I think that there is a big difference between “non-material” and supernatural. I suspect that the dichotomy of material vs not is just a figment of our inability to go beyond our personal experience/intuition at a macro scale, which simply doesn’t extend to a very micro scale. OTOH, I suspect that our desire to believe in some stuff: seeing the future, life after death, etc., is extremely vulnerable to magical wish fulfillment, so it deserves a very high standard of evidence which AFAIK hasn’t been met so far.
I suspect that our desire to believe in supernatural stuff: seeing the future, life after death, etc., is just magical wish fulfillment, which deserves a very high standard of evidence which hasn’t been met so far.
I am a little curious Nick. Just how do you know that a high standard of evidence has not been met yet? Who told you that? What book or published paper informed you of that fact? The exact opposite is true. The evidence has been met over and over again. I can name a number of very famous Physicists who agree with me. Paul Davies comes to mind. Davies is a strong opponent of materialism. And if you don’t know who Paul Davies is then you don’t know shit about physics or cosmology. Philip Goff is another. I just finish reading his great book, “Why: The Purpose of the Universe.” I have been studying this subject for several years now. I could name you several other very famous physicists who are not Materialists.
Materialism is an ideology, and ideology makes one immune to anything that contradicts their belief system. They refuse to examine the evidence because they say such evidence could not possibly exist. Sean Carroll, another physicist, wrote in his book “The Big Picture”: You don’t need to set up elaborate double-blind protocols to pass judgement on the abilities of these reported psychics….
The reason is simple: what we know about the laws of physics is sufficient to rule out the possibility of psychic powers.
So you say the evidence is just not there. Bullshit, the evidence is overwhelming. The evidence would fill a dozen encyclopedias. Some physicists, like Sean Carroll, simply refuse to even examine the evidence because their ideology tells them that such evidence cannot possibly exist. As to near-death experiences, there have been millions. One doctor has catalogued over 5,000 of them. They all can be found on his website “NDERF.Org” He breaks out about 300 very special cases here: Exceptional Experiences
The only argument possible for the materialists to make is: “They are all lying”. In my book I call it “Liars Logic”. It is a little like what flat earthers believe about everyone who claims to have evidence that the world is a globe: They are all lying!
This seems helpful: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-death-experiences/386231/
They had a more recent article about research that suggests that the brain lives (or can be revived) far longer than was previously thought, but it has eluded me for the moment.
I’m really not sure how a catalog of NDEs helps us. No one is arguing that NDEs don’t exist, or that they can’t be powerful experiences.
And I don’t know why physicists are writing about NDEs or psychic stuff. Sure, modern physics says that precognition (aka time travel) would be extremely difficult (involving stupendous amounts of energy), but really this is dilettantism: this is just way outside their expertise.
Really, much of modern physics is speculative, because humans are a very long way from understanding everything. Speculation is normal in science, it’s fine except people generally don’t understand just how little we still understand. Silly to get all bent out of shape when we’re still blind African explorers, touching an elephant trunk and thinking we’re handling a big snake.
Nick, your link, all except the first few sentences, was behind a paywall. The rest of your post made little sense. Time travel??? Why the hell did you bring that up. Much of physics is speculative? Of course, that is common knowledge among all physicists. But that had little to do with our debate.
Anyway, thanks for exchange. I have always been a student of the human belief system and I always learn something from every debate. This one was no exception. Thanks.
Ron,
Yeah, the reference to time travel was too short. Much of what is described as psychic phenomena involves knowledge of the future, aka some form of time travel.
The point about speculation is that people are trying to apply very preliminary theories to daily life. That seems like a bad idea to me. There are a significant number of people who may or may not have physics expertise who are glomming onto speculative ideas as confirmation of old religious concepts (and others who argue against that).
Christian Scientists and Buddhists particularly love this stuff.
—————————
“ My opinions are based on reason, logic, evidence, and common sense and absolutely nothing else”
My antennae go up when I hear that. It’s an impossible standard. One can only do one’s best to attempt to do that. If you’re really telling yourself that you’ve 100% succeeded then you’re in trouble.
Nick, I don’t use speculative ideas or religious concepts in my research. I only deal with evidence. My son called the near-death reports “anecdotal evidence”. I replied that a dozen reports are anecdotal evidence. Five thousand reports amount to more than anecdotal evidence. Either there are some real phenomena there or five thousand people are all lying. He did not respond. I don’t expect you to respond either.
Take care.
Ron,
Your son is being sensible – listen to him.
The volume of anecdotes really, really isn’t meaningful. Christian Scientists can give 10s of thousands of “healings”. Millions have gone to Lourdes.
Again, no one doubts that NDEs exist, or that they aren’t very meaningful for the “experiencers”. It’s not clear how the anecdotes help explain whether their source is internal or external.
Nick, you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Christian Scientist who was healed were all Christian Scientists. The Lourdes story is a little different. Yes, they were all Catholic but damn few of them got healed. Those who experienced a near-death experience were Catholic, Baptist, Moslem, atheist, those who had no idea what a near-death experience was, and those who did not believe in near-death experiences.
Until you examine the evidence, from the link I posted, you are not qualified to criticize the evidence. Quite obviously you have not even bothered to examine any evidence whatsoever. That is typical of those who hold an ideology. Nothing that disagrees with the ideology even needs to be examined because it is impossible.
Nick, you will never examine the evidence that disagrees with your ideology because you believe that it is impossible for such evidence to even exist.
That is the curse that all who subscribe to an ideology must live with. It is a flaw in the human reasoning system. I have no idea how it will ever be overcome. I doubt that it ever will be.
Again, take care.
Ron
Ron,
You have no idea what evidence I’ve examined. You apparently assume that I haven’t looked at much because I’m disagreeing with you. You haven’t made any actual argument except “look at all these stories – wow!”.
Tell us: what should we be looking for in these stories that proves that there is something non-material going on here?
“ Christian Scientist who was healed were all Christian Scientists. “
You’ve missed the point entirely. The point is that Christian Science doesn’t work. They can show you lots of “testimonies” that prove nothing.
Ron:
” You look instead for confirmation bias to support what you already believe or disbelieve.”
Of course I know you mean this in a generic sense, not as an accusation of shallow thinking on my part, even though I’m not reading your mind.
Every one is at risk of letting this kind of intellectual laziness into their thought processes. If we are honest we restrain our gag reflexes and sometimes read stuff that we are pretty sure is bunk. I’m open minded. Heck, I was reading an article on Newsmax this afternoon.
But I’ve read all I need to know about Christianity, Islam, telepathy and telekinesis among many other subjects. I also do not read cookbooks or topics on medieval archery although I do read a lot of general history because it tells me a lot about who we are and how we came to this situation .Perhaps my world is too small.
When does a person stop reading about concepts that have demonstrated themselves to be irrelevant to them for many decades? Should we seek out introductory materials on every conceivable topic just in case we’ve missed something?
I do agree, after looking up the definition, that materialism can be considered an ideology, that is, a system of thought. I expect that virtually every living being practices a level of materialism just to get through the day. We all accept that the ground will be there after each step. that red light still means stop and that the person on the other side of the card table cannot see our cards or read our mind.
Maybe credible evidence exists somewhere that that Jesus turned loaves into fishes or that humans can teleport themselves to another planet. It’s just not likely enough to be worth seeking.
I’ll look up an obtuse subject when I think I can learns something useful or interesting but I only have so much time left in this realm.
Reply to Nick who wrote:
You’ve missed the point entirely. The point is that Christian Science doesn’t work. They can show you lots of “testimonies” that prove nothing.
Oh good god, my point was that Christian Science has not one goddamn thing to do with this debate because they are Christian Scientist who have their own ideology. Near-death experiencers have no ideology because they are from every segment of the world’s population, from every other ideology but they have none. The fact that this flew right over your head means that this debate is over, Bye now.
JJ Wrote: Maybe credible evidence exists somewhere that that Jesus turned loaves into fishes or that humans can teleport themselves to another planet. It’s just not likely enough to be worth seeking.
That statement alone tells me that you have not one fucking idea what this debate is all about.
Bye now.
“That statement alone tells me that you have not one fucking idea what this debate is all about.”
Of course I do. To my surprise it is being dominated by such strongly held belief in an ideology that has curtailed polite discussion
I’m good with “bye”.
Ron,
In the early years of Christian Science, most people came for the healing, not the ideology. The church has books full of their testimonies.
On the other hand, almost everybody in the western world has grown up with a culture of the afterlife. So…almost everyone is prepared with these ideas. And NDEs are becoming more and more common, with modern medicine.
The key point: anecdotal evidence is not helpful, no matter how large the numbers. It certainly points to *something*, but not necessarily what it looks like on the surface.
Are scientists open to Bigfoot, Nick? If so, send them up my way. I’ll introduce them to some locals with testimony.
Here’s a good one of recent
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sRXawY254gY&t=332s&pp=ygUicm9ja3kgbW91bnRhaW4gc2FzcXVhdGNoIG9pbGZpZWxkIA==
The FAO [Global] Food Price Index stood at 124.4 points in September 2024, up 3 percent from August and marking the largest month-on-month increase since March 2022. Price quotations for all commodities included in the index strengthened
Well that stinks. Reading about it, it seems like a range of poor conditions, a bad sugar crop in Brazil, wet conditions for wheat in Canada and Europe, lower than expected oil production in SE Asia and the US (for soy).
Hopefully this is just a blip.
A comment by Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Jack Smith filing:
A new filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith, released by Judge Tanya Chutkan, provides illuminating detail about the tenacity shown by former president Donald Trump and his Republican co-conspirators in their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It is a stark reminder of the perils of Trump’s personalization of power.
”At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” the prosecutors’ document reads. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”
On that basis, the filing argues that Trump is not entitled to the immunity from prosecution granted him by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and other far-right ideologue-justices of the Supreme Court; that ruling would grant immunity for “official acts” executed as president.
The document reminds us of Trump’s success at developing a personalist model of governance, in which the private legal, political, financial and other needs of the leader take precedence over national and party imperatives in the expenditure of time and energy among party and other political elites and in the formulation of policy.
Trump’s success at remaking the GOP as his personal tool is one example. GOP resources have been diverted to meet to Trump’s bottomless needs for more money and more control. The RNC continued to pay Trump’s personal legal bills long after he left office, and the placement of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as RNC head consolidated this personal influence.
Like all strongmen, Trump is unencumbered by moral precepts or other checks on behavior. Such leaders specialize in getting others to do things that were previously unthinkable, like planning an assault on the U.S. Capitol, and they lead their enablers to think that they will get away with everything as long as they stay loyal. Prominent Republicans who figure in the filing enabled Trump and were active in all phases of the attempt to subvert the election, as one solution after another failed and the recourse to violence became a reality.
It is worth remembering that GOP co-conspirators included sitting Republican lawmakers. These individuals neglected the jobs they were elected to do in order to help Trump solve an unacceptable personal situation: he had lost the election and would have to leave a position that was generating considerable financial largesse for him and his businesses.
We already knew that elected GOP officials such as Senator Mike Lee and Representative Chip Roy ignored the needs of their constituents to work overtime on schemes to invalidate the 2020 election results and keep Trump in office illegally. Text messages they exchanged with the chief coup organizer, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, revealed their commitment to undoing a free and fair election.
Lee commented at one point that he was putting in 14 hours a day to assist Trump in solving his problem. It is an example of how elites caught up in authoritarian personality cults cast aside their duties to their constituents to please the leader.
Reviewing these past exchanges in the light of the revelations of Jack Smith’s new filing is chilling. The conspirators use a callous and casual tone in discussing how to interrupt the peaceful and democratic transfer of power, and they did not abandon Trump even when the utter illegality of his proposals became undeniable. In those months they were immersed in the world of Trump’s desperation and his increasing demands on them —in a world in which loyalty to Trump, regardless of the criminal nature of what he asked them to do, was all that mattered.
Jack Smith’s brief keeps the focus on Trump, concluding that “[w]hen the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.” Whatever fallout came to those helping him was not his concern.
It is entirely in keeping with the former president’s transactional nature that he replied “So what” on Jan. 6 to the news that his Vice President Mike Pence had to be moved to a safe location. Pence had disobeyed Trump in refusing to block the certification of the election results, and thus his usefulness to Trump had ended. Trump had tried to turn his mob against Pence as a way of pressuring Pence to “do the right thing,” but when that failed Trump had no further interest in Pence for the moment.
This lack of care towards those who have served him faithfully has apparently not been fully understood by GOP elites such as Lee, who are still out there flogging away for their leader. One day they will understand that all their efforts on Trump’s behalf have earned them no goodwill. With the strongman, loyalty must be proven every day, because his ego and his mania to control everyone and everything demand it.
Jack Smith’s focus on the private and personal nature of Trump’s actions highlights the corruption that has overtaken the GOP, which now places Trump over party and country to the detriment of our democracy.
Sadly, I think Ben-Ghiat underestimates the level of corruption we’re dealing with.
I’ve been reading “The Longest Con” by Joe Conason. He details the long-term, gradually expanding corruption of the right-wing in the US. It appears quite accurate. OTOH, it’s very depressing, so I haven’t been able to read a lot at one sitting…
Nick, you once recommended “Democracy in Chains”. Thank you, so do I. In a similar vein is Katherine Stewart’s book The Power Worshippers. It catalogues the incredible infrastructure that the religious right has put together along with the rich families backing them. The introduction alone is worth the price of the book…
I downloaded the sample (which is free) and I’ll read the intro! Heck, I’ll probably read the rest, too…
Also very good, IMHO: Oligarchy, by Jeffrey Winters.
What I find so dismally interesting/perplexing is just how gullible and hungry for this type of leader the republican voters are. Just Astounding.
Incredible just how low the bar has become for the character of a person is now to qualify for leadership positions. No respect for law and order, for the independent judicial process, for the will of the voting public, and for the traditions of the democracy…such as peaceful transfer of power.
And yet people clamor for it, and grovel in the sewer for it despite being publicly disgraced by him.
Hats off to the few who have principles. Liz Cheney as a prime example.
I hope she gets a strong position in the coming administration…something like secretary of state.
“— Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states only produce 29 percent of our income and wealth.”
I’m surprised it is 29–
Thought it would be less
One for fanboi Fred Magyar
Elon Musk has been funding Trump’s anti-immigrant mastermind. Uncovered donations by the Wall Street Journal reveal that Musk has spent millions to back anti-immigrant and anti-transgender initiatives.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/elon-musk-wsj-trump-stephen-miller-donations/
Are we saved yet, Fred?
PS ~ new record low
https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php
Wondering how OFM did with the hurricane. I think his area was beyond the region with the bad damage.
And Stephen Hren…I believe he is from N.Carolina.
Lucked out personally, other than being without grid juice for six days.
There’s at least a couple of dozen big trees down within a hundred yards of my house but I got off scot free except for the cleanup.
Lots of big trees hit a lot of houses in this area.
But the local terrain or landscape is such that flooding is not a problem for my immediate local area. Most houses sit well away from any land likely to be flooded, and we’re too near the head waters of local streams and rivers.
Glad you’re oki!!
Hideaway
Great post and good essay link.
The problem with some of the arguments against a collapse scenario is that population decline will also remove the information needed to maintain a complex system. We’re already seeing this happening in the trades. As the older generation retires and expires the newer generation doesn’t retain the knowledge needed to maintain the system. The assumption is that existing systems will simply be there but they won’t.
Entropy is nothing more or less than the loss of information.
Another issue is Liebig’s law. There are a lot of choke points in a complex system. This is one example.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/modern-economy-rests-single-road-north-carolina-where-hurricane-collapsed-bridges
Maybe a butterfly flaps its wings in Taiwan.
Our present way of life is not robust rather it’s extremely fragile and fragmented. Technology isn’t saving us rather it is more efficiently killing us. More of the same will lead to less.
Yeah, your boy Putin is desperate to prove the West is collapsing. That’s why outlets like zerohedge are pushing the line. He also got Republicans like his fanboy NC Senator Ted Budd to vote against FEMA funding just before Helena hit. Anything to stick it to the libs.
Hideaway argues that non-fossil energy production mechanisms should not be deployed since
-they are net energy negative
-they will simply pile on to the already massive destruction of the biosphere
-civilization is due to collapse regardless due to massive overshoot, so why bother trying
And I’ll add that his time horizon/timespan is pretty short so why worry about energy poverty.
On the first point- that is simply far off base for many of the systems that have proven viability…they are being successfully deployed at scale. Whether its hydroelectricity or photovoltaic in a sunny area these mechanisms are strongly net energy positive including the entire lifecycle analysis.
Secondly, I’ll once again point out that humanity will not simply lay down and accept energy poverty without a fight….any more than Hideaway (or any of us) has refrained from opening the refrigerator door, putting clothes in the machine washer, eating cooked food or turning the key in his vehicle ignition switch.
I am all for restraint. A cultural recognition and exultation of restraint behavior such as preserving lands and waters for nature, forgoing travel, having no/less children, and avoiding combustion that isn’t for critical purpose should become a favored stance of humanity. But that is a little different than simply laying down as he suggests. That difference probably needs to be hashed out in its details. Maybe it comes down to a difference of extent or severity, and timing. But its probably a lot more than just that.
I am not holding my breathe for humanity to wholesale change stance or behavior voluntarily. Rather it will be a forcing.
How does forcing manisfest itself? Sometimes gently as in escalating food, energy, manufactured goods, insurance pricing…higher and higher as limitations kick in. Or more abruptly with civil disruption (read about Haiti or Sudan or Middle East to get a glimpse), famines, migrations.
Hickory,
Well articulated as usual.
I think that arguments of getting a fair share of the pie, due to manufacturing capability or raw material resources might be a short term objective of concern. It is a very legitimate concern (but not “all or nothing” as Hideaway puts it).
At the same time there are equality concerns. It is much more pleasant getting rich in an egalitarian society than in the oppressive one. Above all economic growth will please all parties no matter the system. When growth is not there and economic disparity gets out control, solutions have to be invented way upfront as a rule in order to bring some stability.
The energy balance is a very interesting subject. It will always be work in process. T. Hill brought in the entropy question upthread. The last time we had the “when the modern society is going to crumble” debate, I said in could very well be in 100-150 years time and D. Coyne said 200 years+. Some people are going to ridicule that point of view, but it is very plausible.
Hickory ….
Talk about getting a persons arguments all mixed up, to suit the narrative of what you think…
Firstly I’ll start with this bit…. Hickory ….”I’ll once again point out that humanity will not simply lay down and accept energy poverty without a fight”
I totally agree with you on this, and have stated it many times. Every prior civilization also fought all the way to avoid collapse and all failed. The benefits of civilization as seen by the vast majority of people totally outweigh the alternative which is pretty much the survival of the fittest, so yes it will be clung onto for as long as possible, no matter what the destruction to the natural world..
I completely agree, and always have yet you keep bringing it up as if I don’t agree, why??
This is also where, if we were as ‘wise’ as the name we’ve given ourselves would suggest, then we would come to terms with, understand, and act upon the reality that any civilization based on metals and minerals that suffer from entropy and dissipation was not possible in the long term, simply because it takes an increasing quantity of energy to mine, refine and distribute the same quantity of metals.
Instead of admitting reality, and being wise about the destruction we are doing to our only home, planet Earth, we tell ourselves lies about how we can have it all, by just changing one aspect to another. By believing all the lies, we can feel not guilty about further destruction to the natural world, up to the point where the physics of reality kicks in and the artificial system of civilization collapses, once again.
The only difference being, we have a totally global civilization this time, and have used up all the easy to gain access to metals and minerals.
Hickory …. “Hideaway argues that non-fossil energy production mechanisms should not be deployed since
-they are net energy negative”.
You wont be able to find me stating this anywhere, simply because I’ve never stated this, ever… What I have consistently stated over and over is that it’s not a replacement for the existing system as it doesn’t provide anything like the net energy of the fossil fuels we’ve built the system with. My own work on EROEI shows that solar has an EROEI of around 2 at best, (at present using fossil fuels to build), when ALL energy inputs are taken into consideration, which no research paper I’ve ever read does take into consideration. They all set ‘boundaries’ of energy inputs they exclude, which is ridiculous, as none should be excluded to find the realistic situation, but reality doesn’t suit the narrative…
Hickory….. “-they will simply pile on to the already massive destruction of the biosphere”. Yes, entirely true. We tell ourselves lies that every new mine is only destroying a little bit of the ecosphere, therefore it’s OK, as we need this particular metal or mineral to help save the overall planet from climate change, so justify every new bit of destruction..
How much have we saved the natural world from climate change over the last 30 years by using diesel bulldozers to destroy natural habitat around the world, then bring in diesel operated processing facilities to get some more minerals and metals to keep civilization going?? A simple look at the Keeling curve shows how much the effort in ‘going green’ is really helping the situation.
The ‘energy transition’, is nothing but a lie, as we’ve had solar and wind technology for many decades, yet fossil fuel use is still at record highs and growing. All that’s happened is we’ve added solar and wind into a world energy mix, that keeps growing until it can’t.
We’ve never transitioned from one form of energy use, to another. The oil age didn’t replace the coal age. The oil age made a lot more coal use happen as coal was easier to access with large diesel machines, so we use a lot more coal than we did before the oil age. The coal age didn’t replace wood either, we now use more biomass than we ever did before the use of coal. We clear forests in Canada and the US to sell wood pellets to the UK, all using oil operated machines, and call the electricity produced by burning the wood pellets ‘green’.
Hickory …. ” civilization is due to collapse regardless due to massive overshoot, so why bother trying”
Civilization will collapse, it’s a certainty due to entropy, dissipation, and lower ore grades. If we had an unlimited cheap and easy source of energy, we’d eventually overheat the planet anyway with our ‘growth’ of modern civilization. Luckily we don’t have an unlimited cheap and easy source of energy. We use cheap coal, oil and gas, to make energy expensive, solar, wind and batteries.
All the bullshit about the sun being effectively limitless, always totally overlooks the point that we need to use energy to build machines that gather that energy. It’s the energy and materials spent on the machines that counts.
BTW, EROEI is not static either. As the metals become lower grade the energy invested into solar, wind and batteries (and everything else, nuclear, coal plants, etc) continues to fall, as more energy is needed to build the machines from the lower ore grades…..
This is why I keep raising the point about the new Aluminium Smelters based on new coal fired power generation being built in Indonesia. If solar, wind and batteries were really a ‘cheaper’ form of electricity, these new coal based power plants wouldn’t be built at all. It would be economically cheaper to base the Aluminium smelters on solar, wind and batteries if they were cheaper energy over the life of the Aluminium smelter.
All the research papers, and LCOE research keeps telling us solar, wind and batteries are cheaper energy, yet we, as in humanity, keeps building coal fired power plants to provide cheap Aluminium, which is needed for the non existent ‘green transition’. It has to tell you something is very, very wrong with the ‘calculations’ of so many research papers..
Hickory …. “I am not holding my breathe for humanity to wholesale change stance or behavior voluntarily. Rather it will be a forcing.”
Again I fully agree, I’m not advocating lying down, nor have I ever, and you certainly can’t quote me saying so. There is a huge difference in pointing out the direction we are heading, by telling ourselves lies and lying down. I’m trying to highlight how we’ve been going in the wrong direction for decades if not centuries and there can be only one outcome, which is collapse, because it’s certain to happen. It is certain because people want to believe optimists and economists that completely ignore the natural world, and the limits of material availability due to the energy restraints of what we use, to gather the metals and minerals, we rely upon for our modern civilization.
At some point in the near future we will reach maximum possible oil production (assuming we haven’t already), then decline in production happens, slowly at first, but gathering pace to the downside soon after. The very nature of how we acquire oil from declining fields guarantees that at some point a great acceleration to the downside has to happen. During this great accelerating decline, the ability of the 6 continent supply chains we totally rely upon for modern civilization start to break down as there is simply not the energy to maintain it all, with the rapidly declining oil production.
We’ve had large material and energy savings by having a global system and these economies of scale start to breakdown as people everywhere realise they have to go ‘local’, because of the energy restraints. However going local for everything of modernity is not possible, as it takes more energy and materials to build everything locally than the world wide scale, which is impossible to do with less energy and materials.
Replacement parts for existing machinery relies upon the 6 continent supply chain working, so replacements for many seemingly small parts of the overall system become unavailable. The number of feedback loops that kick in, in a chaotic manner is impossible to calculate, yet it will make the civilization we all rely on unravel very rapidly.
An accelerating decline in oil, will make drilling for oil much harder with the world wide supply chain issues happening, which re-enforces the accelerating decline, which effects coal, gas, solar, wind and batteries decline, plus the mining of everything including uranium for nuclear fuel, plus food for cities.
We will just keep lying to ourselves as a species that we can have it all, when realistically only ~15% of all humanity enjoys the full comfort of modernity now, so any longer term predictions of falling human numbers in 6, 8,10 decades from now is pretty irrelevant, when even half of present population can’t live a modern lifestyle.
We only have modernity because of the scale of human development, and we get energy and material savings by having this scale, but it’s all way too much for the natural world to endure, as evidenced by multitudes of research on biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, endocrine disruptors, micro plastics, etc. All this damage is a byproduct of our civilization, not small parts of it.
We are in a predicament of vast overshoot, we don’t have a problem with solutions. All we can do now is to try and reduce future suffering of both humanity and the ecosphere, but instead we keep looking for ‘answers’ that don’t, and physically can’t exist. It means instead of heeding warnings we’ve had from aware people for decades to centuries, we ignore it all and go headlong into full collapse in the near future.
All the ‘efforts’ of trying to go renewable/sustainable etc, have just been exacerbating the overall problem of growing modern civilization, so when the collapse happens it’s from a greater height with much more damage to the natural world we rely on, happening during the collapse, as starving billions eat every bit of megafauna they can find to stay alive, and burn every tree to stay warm….
So, it sounds like you think we should go on a campaign to shut things down.
Where do/did you start, besides at your home?
Coal mines right? LNG production/handling facilities? Gas stations? Airports? Ports?
Those are the big ones.
Start with Australia right?
To make anything positive happen that had the slightest chance of improving the situation overall, it would have to be a world wide committed effort, which both you and I know simply isn’t going to happen.
Even in the US when you had a president that that was aware of energy trouble ahead and promoted a scale down, he was promptly voted out of office by someone that promised we were just in the dawn of a new era and American ingenuity would save the day. That was 44 years ago…
I fully agree with you that we go full throttle ahead with green growth, using more fossil fuels in the process, just like we have done for the last couple of decades, until we reach the point where total energy available to the system starts contracting at an accelerating rate down and we collapse the entirety of modern civilization. Whether someone decides it’s the fault of those ‘over there’ and starts WW3 before or during the collapse, or a financial meltdown happens, or another pandemic that actually kills millions to billions, first, I have no idea.
“I fully agree with you that we go full throttle ahead with green growth”
I think that regions and countries will go ahead with whatever they can afford to avoid energy poverty, with all other considerations being secondary or window dressing. Its simply the nature of Homo pyromancer.
I don’t believe in the terminology ‘green growth’…we left that quaint notion behind in the early Bronze age.
And I’m not a buyer of ‘energy transition’-
Efforts to change are more aptly termed ‘energy adaptation’…attempting to adapt to the problems of fossil fuel depletion, global greenhouse heating from mass combustion, and the uncertainties/risk of living with imported energy supplies.
I am all for brisk and ‘all hands on deck’ attempts at energy adaptation, prioritizing the most available and least damaging sources and techniques that can be deployed.
In the meantime we should put as much of the biosphere as we can into permanent ‘no-man land’ status.
we should go on a campaign to shut things down.
Just tax energy consumption and let the market do the rest. Most energy is wasted anyway, so it won’t damage the economy if done right.
There is absolutely no shortage of energy. We’re burning through fossil fuels because they aren’t priced to reflex their true cost. Also cheap energy is good if the economy is energy poor, but in rich societies it just encourages waste.
If solar, wind and batteries were really a ‘cheaper’ form of electricity, these new coal based power plants wouldn’t be built at all
This is a ridiculous argument.
First, all kinds of crazy stuff happens. People make mistakes. You are basically claiming that the whole world is making a mistake with its massive investment in solar, but this one project cannot possibly be wrong.
Furthermore, even if this one project makes sense, or made sense when it was dreamed up, that doesn’t mean it still makes sense now, or that it makes sense everywhere else.
Finally, you fail to even present evidence that the project is a good decision. They may well be regretting their choice but going with sunk costs. Their hand may be forced by coal mining interests. We don’t know anything about it, and if you do, you’re mighty cagy with your information.
Alimbiquated, Your 2 posts, first says let the market work it out, the second states there must be something else, it isn’t the market…
Sorry you were correct the first time, the market has easily sorted it out, the coal fired power station lasting 40 years, will produce electricity of around 360,000,000MWh assuming usual capacity factors of what the coal power stations are capable of.
To replace this with solar and batteries, you would need the solar replaced at around 20 years, and the batteries replaced 4 times in total. (there could be no wind as there is no decent wind resource there)
The Adaro smelter and power plant, that you have the ability to google just like everyone else, will cost around $US2B for the coal power station of 1,100MW, and the build of the smelter, they already own the coal rights, which are in the ground near surface, on site (couple of Km away).
Just the first set of batteries alone, to last say 3 nights and 2 days to cover for cloudy weather, which would still mean shutdowns when inclement weather exceeded this, would cost $US11.5B at a rate of $US150/KWh of storage, which is far cheaper than any price I can find for a set up system on industrial scale by almost half magnitude. Cost wise, it isn’t even close…
It’s amazing how all the people that think a bright green future is possible, can never answer why there are ZERO off grid Aluminium smelters running off there own solar, wind and batteries or some combination of these, when the narrative is that this is the cheapest form of power!!!
Economically it clearly isn’t cheaper, or many companies around the world would be doing it!!
It’s either, no single Aluminium producer from anywhere around the world, wants to be the cheapest producer of Aluminium, using only the cheapest forms of power and therefore the most profitable Aluminium producer in the world, with the best green credentials…
OR..
The narrative about solar and wind with batteries being cheaper is wrong….
Article from 2023 on Adaro aluminum smelter project.
https://www.ft.com/content/214da7e7-c858-452c-9aff-e6dab9b805e4
Adaro is a coal mining company looking for a way to increase demand for coal, so they are investing in Aluminum smelters to increase demand for their coal.
The analysis below (from October 2023) questions how profitable this project will be
https://ieefa.org/articles/adaro-aluminum-smelter-plans-indonesia-face-financial-risks
Update from March 2024
https://news.metal.com/newscontent/102684954/Adaros-KIPI-aluminium-smelter-ramps-up-for-full-production-by-early-2026
Dennis, why bother putting up a biased report?? From the last page of the report….
“The Institute’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a diverse, sustainable and profitable energy economy.”
They make an assumption that the coal fired power will cost $US60/MWh. no methodology of how they came to this number at all, just an assumption, then base all their reasons why it’s not economic on this assumption..
Interesting when the mostly brown coal fired Portland Aluminium smelter, with transmission lines of 500 km, is paying just $US14/MWh.
If all you look at are biased reports without any calculations of the single most important input, no wonder you have such a rosy outlook on the world.
I consider that the people that invest in such plants are not dumb and stupid, that they have in fact done their homework on how it will all work and have their costings close to accurate and it would be nowhere near what IEEFA “assumptions” are…
This is going to be a dirty plant putting out 5.2Mt of CO2/yr. I’m not an advocate for it at all, I don’t think they should be building it at all, (it’s due to start operation next year and they are building it!!), yet if you want cheap Aluminium for your EVs bodies and cheap Aluminium for solar panel frames, this is the actual cost in the real world..
Hideaway,
I guess we will see how profitable the project is when it has ramped to full production. In the US the LCOE minimum cost for a new coal power plant is $73/MWh, the $60/MWh estimate seems pretty conservative. Especially when we consider that the opportunity cost for the coal in Indonesia is quite high as in Asian markets the cost of coal (where the Indonesian coal could easily be exported) is much higher than in the US. In 2023 the average price for a tonne of coal in Japan and South China was $125, in the US the price for a tonne of coal was about $30 (when we adjust for higher calorie content of US coal), in other words we would expect the LCOE for a coal power plant in Indonesia to be higher than $73/MWh because the market price of coal in Indonesia is likely higher than in the US.
Dennis you are trying to use opportunity cost as the reason they wont make money providing some of the cheapest Aluminium in the world??
Do you think the people in charge of the project are dumb and stupid in terms of economics?? I don’t!!
They are simply finding the best uses for their resources in today’s economic system. It’s a very economically rational choice in what they are doing, which is where economics is totally wrong in disregarding the ecosphere and ‘value’ of cheap energy, coal in this particular case.
On the one hand you turn to pure economics of a totally free market to prove one point, then turn to govt regulations or subsidies to try and show another you think relevant.
What’s relevant in this case is that the coal is free to Adaro, after paying a royalty to the Govt, to use as they see fit.
All the natural resources on Earth, including coal, oil, gas, wind, sunshine, moving water are free to humanity to use as we see fit. It’s a concept you continue to not understand. The ‘cost’ of any aspect of it is what we humans charge one another. It’s a totally artificial man made concept.
There has been talk of a ‘solar roof’ tax, for people that put up solar panels in this country, which would mean the sunshine is no longer ‘free’, just like the govt charges a ‘royalty’ for miners to mine. How long before Morocco charges a sun tax on European solar plants planned for Morocco???
Because fossil fuels have provided such a huge excess of energy over their energy costs of extraction, we humans have been able to charge each other for uses of this energy. Using money as a counter, is how humanity has spread the energy use around.
Why do solar, wind and batteries constantly need subsidies to spread the energy produced by them around?? It is because they simply don’t create anywhere near the excess energy over the energy used in making them, as the fossil fuels that are used to make them.
It’s the new Aluminium smelters being built on coal energy that will make the price of Aluminium lower, just like they have done to Nickel production, that will send the last Australian Aluminium smelters, based increasingly on renewable power, broke.
Already one in Western Australia has closed, by coincidence (Not!!) in the same year as the last coal fired power station in that state closed.
Solar and wind only have the market share they have in this country because of subsidies and rules (effectively allowing them to go first in the system), instead of relying on economics alone. Now we tell ourselves fairytales about them being ‘cheaper’, despite power bills rising exceptionally above official ‘inflation’ rates.
In economic theory, if something in high ‘demand’ was cheaper, then no subsidies would ever be necessary, nor would you charge the competitor a ‘royalty’, the market by itself would quickly change to the cheapest option…
HIDEAWAY
I didn’t say there is no market. I said that the behavior of a single actor can’t be used as a proxy for the entire market. Markets are stocastic things, lots of people making decisions that turn out to be good, bad, or indifferent. For whatever reason, you choose to ignore the decisions of the large majority of players in favor of this project.
You are wasting everyone’s time with this fixation.
Alimbiquated …. “For whatever reason, you choose to ignore the decisions of the large majority of players in favor of this project.”
So where are all the aluminium smelters being built with just solar, wind and batteries???
This is a new coal power plant to power a new aluminium smelter, while no-one anywhere are building them from just solar, wind and batteries…
The point isn’t about this one being built, it’s just more of what’s been happening for decades. The point is no-one is building them with just solar, wind and batteries because it’s too expensive to do it this way..
Aluminum is 4% of worldwide electricity consumption. You choose to ignore the other 96%
Most aluminum is smelted in China. The 14th 5 Year Plan includes goals for reduced carbon output from the aluminum industry. Solar is probably cheaper anyway, so it is reasonable to expect some progress there. The industry is definitely moving Southwest to use hydropower in Yunnan and Guangxi.
Aluminium smelting is an industrial process. We only have the modern civilization that uses so many machines because of the modern industrial processes. These processes create cheap materials that are used in all machines.
Using Aluminium smelting as a microcosm of our modernity gives a sense of the big picture.
The narrative that we all read in the popular media, over and over is that solar and wind and batteries are much cheaper than coal.
This is clearly false as no-one is building off grid Aluminium smelters on just solar, wind and batteries. People are however building Aluminium smelters based on just coal power, like Adaro..
How is this simple reality of what’s happening so hard for you to accept?? It tells you instantly that the narrative about the cheapness of solar, wind and batteries is bullshit!!
Talking about some Aluminium smelters going towards hydropower, or geothermal for that matter is totally irrelevant. They are different types of electricity production that is very limited by location. The grand plan is to go solar and wind for most of our power, clearly in every ‘report or paper’ about the bright green future..
Solar, wind and batteries, as they are currently being made, are nowhere near as cheap as the fossil fuels for continuous industrial processes, which are needed to provide the solar panels, wind turbines and batteries..
Civilization doesn’t have the energy and materials to make cheap solar, wind and batteries from just electrical processes powered by renewables. We could possibly made a small quantity of very expensive solar, wind and batteries with just electrical processes powered by the same, plus ‘a bit’ of fossil fuels, but not enough to maintain the existing system of which 98-99% of all energy and materials are now used on.
When the world simplifies due to less overall energy as oil production declines, the complexity of all these industrial processes becomes too difficult to maintain, let alone grow. The production of solar, wind and batteries will decline rapidly as the complexity unravels. It’s a thermodynamic certainty.
Hideaway,
The physical laws have been in place since the universe has existed, but life exists and counteracts the tendency toward randomness by utilizing energy. At some point the energy in the universe might be exhausted, though my understanding of cosmology is limited and I am fairly certain that human understanding of this is incomplete. In the meantime there is much that is uncertain. Your belief that you know with certainty how things will play out seems foolish from my perspective. The earth system will not run short on energy for a billion years, in fact the problem over time will be too much rather than too little energy as the Sun’s output will increase over the next billion years likely evaporating the water from the planet and likely making the planet too hot to support human life. Over the next million years or so, we might be ok if we avoid problems from climate change, nuclear weapons and AI.
Regarding aluminium smelters, as I have mentioned before, the largest hydro plants in northern Sweden in the early 1900s were built with alu smelting at least partly in mind.
The first, Porjus, was mainly built to power iron ore rail transport from Kiruna to Narvik, Norway (btw., Churchill wanted to bomb Kiruna during ww2 for that specific reason) but there were also plans for an aluminium smelter nearby. Harsprånget built downstream a bit later with ~950 Mw would help power it.
Got hydro?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porjus_Hydroelectric_Power_Station
I am not holding my breathe for humanity to wholesale change stance or behavior voluntarily.
America may have passed peak obesity, thanks to appetite curbing drugs.
https://www.ft.com/content/21bd0b9c-a3c4-4c7c-bc6e-7bb6c3556a56
Complexity requires specialization which requires transportation. It’s built on critical mass consumption. A shrinking contracting system has to simplify.
Its healthy to challenge your assumptions and biased notions…yes we all have a pile of those.
I acknowledge that I have talked about things here based on a short time frame, out to about 2050. In that short time frame it makes plenty of sense to deploy various mechanisms to wean ourselves off of our collective reliance on fossil fuels which amounts to something like 85% of primary global energy supply.
Yet as others have pointed out the fossil fuels also enable close to 100% of the other source supplies.
The effort to diversify energy supply will be simply a game of extension, by and large. The carbon based energy is a one time deposit into the human arsenal. No getting around that.
All are tempted to argue that non-fossil sources can independently power civilization, but lets acknowledge that any such system will be small compared to what we have at our disposal now, and/or temporary.
We here on earth are stuck with diminishing long term outlook for energy, unless you would like to believe that some incredible new source of energy will come to our fingertips…which might qualify you for a lifetime ticket on Musks mars colony.
We need to work at continually adjust our understanding of the basic idea of overshoot…and perhaps even act to live with that in mind.
Hickory,
World % consumption of fossil fuel out of total energy consumption from Energy Institute.
Thanks Dennis. I wonder when we will get down to 50%?
And perhaps more importantly, what will be the population and total energy supply at that time?
Fossil fuel use based on Energy institute’s 2024 report are still 85% of primary power if you don’t use the ridiculous ‘substitution method’, which doesn’t account for ‘products’ obtained from fossil fuels, that are included in the overall energy numbers.
So we include the primary energy in products in the fossil fuel category, but leave any need for products out of the substitution method. Products like fertilizer, explosives, plastics, asphalt, coke, pesticides, herbicides and multitudes of chemicals, all required by modern civilization.
The substitution method does not compare like with like, as the 3 fossil fuels provide the above products while renewables and nuclear provide none. It’s a clear case of GIGO.
What do the numbers look like without using the ‘substitution method??
In 2007, the high point of your graph…. 86% of primary energy came from fossil fuels.
In 2023…. 85% of primary energy came from fossil fuels. Amazing isn’t it, using the real numbers, instead of the ‘substitution method’, that makes false assumptions, we get a different answer…
In other words using the raw data and not corrupting it, there has only been a 1% decrease of fossil fuel use in total energy use, with a very decent percentage of those fossil fuels being products, that we have no substitute for in a world of all renewables.
Please don’t respond with biomass making up for product, as we are already using too much of the natural world’s biomass, and human’s ‘needed’ biomass production will fall rapidly without the fertilizers anyway…
Dennis if you keep believing in corrupt numbers from those trying to prove a point, instead of looking at what’s happening in the real world, you will keep getting the wrong answers…..
Total primary energy use in 2007, was 136,630 TWh, in 2023 it had risen to 164,097TWh an increase of 27,467TWh. How much of this increase did non fossil fuel sources combined contribute to this increase??
5,583TWh or about 20% of the increase… (this includes geothermal, biomass, new hydro, etc).
In every decent period of time, where it allows for the full building of the mines, processing plants and factories involved in making solar panels, wind turbines etc, the total amount of fossil fuel use has grown by multiples of renewables.
Solar and wind have grown by 3,919TWh since 2007, or about 14% of total primary energy use with other renewables around 6%, with fossil fuels making up the rest. In other words fossil fuels are still making up around 80% of the increases in primary energy use..
Without those increases in fossil fuel use we couldn’t have built the mines, processing plants, factories, new roads, ports, ships, bridges, etc, etc required for renewable to grow!!
Every increase in production of renewables comes with an increase in fossil fuel use, which is why it’s a dead end for humanity, but instead of believing in reality, we make up fairytales like your graph above, to convince ourselves reality doesn’t exist…
Hideaway,
The substitution method makes perfect sense for the fossil fuel used as energy. Some of the fossil fuel is used to produce products, such as plastic, synthetic fiber, other petrochemicals, and fertilizer. If this gets excluded from fossil fuel energy, there would be smaller amount of energy provided by fossil fuel. If a unit of electricity produced by solar or wind replaces a unit of electricity produced by coal or natural gas, then it makes perfect sense to count the solar or wind as the equivalent of the primary energy that would be utilized to produce a unit of electricity with coal or natural gas. On average about 40% of the primary energy of coal or natural gas gets converted to electrical energy, so on average each TWh of electricity produced with wind or solar replaces 2.5 TWh of primary fossil fuel energy.
Do you have a good estimate of how much fossil fuel is converted into products, rather than being burned as energy?
“ We here on earth are stuck with diminishing long term outlook for energy, unless you would like to believe that some incredible new source of energy will come to our fingertips”
130,000 terawatts of continuous solar energy isn’t enough? Humans only use maybe 15!
Nick the 130,000TW of solar has been happening for millions of years when we didn’t have modernity. It allows plants to grow..
It’s not the sunlight falling on Earth that’s our limitation, it’s the metals and minerals turned into machines that’s the limit. We will still have 130,000TW of solar hitting Earth in a thousand years time when the few million humans still existing are trying to grow some food from that sunshine…
We only have access to sunlight by building machines using fossil fuels at every stage. The ore grades of the metals and minerals needed for the entirety of our complex civilization to work are falling, meaning more energy required to just maintain existing production of everything.
It’s a complex system, so you can’t just take out ‘bits’ and not expect feedback loops to effect the production of ‘everything else’. Once oil energy production starts to fall in an accelerating manner, we wont have the energy to maintain the existing system, let alone grow anything, so ‘bits’ start to fall off the system.
At first the entirety of the system tries to compensate for whatever ‘bits’ no longer works, by substituting all over the place, patching all sort of other ‘bits’ that start to fail, due to lack of the first bits to fail AND lack of energy to keep the overall system going.
Whether it’s a mouse, tree, elephant, hurricane, civilization, or star, they are all just systems that need a constant supply of materials and energy to grow and function, then when the inputs are failing the system at some point dies, as in total collapse. Every system eventually dies of old age anyway, where they suddenly collapse because of internal failure of some subsystem.
It’s interesting that the largest of the systems like stars die much earlier than small stars, because they burn all the fuel much faster, due to greater gravity.
Our civilization will die much faster than earlier small simple civilizations because modernity and complexity allowed us to gather a lot more energy and materials so rapidly, and grow very rapidly, to a much larger size than any prior civilization.
Once the energy inputs reduce because of depletion, material inputs rapidly follows suit, internal subsystems break down, accelerating the process of internal decay and death. That’s the prognosis for every system I mentioned above and every system I didn’t mention, of which modern civilization is no exception.
You keep looking in the wrong places of important to keep modernity going. The 130,000TW of power from the sun is irrelevant, we can use what we can use, but we are only able to make machines that turn sunlight into electricity by mining lower grades of ores and fossil fuels to run our industrial processes.
How come you keep missing this simple reality??
Hideaway,
How do you miss the simple reality that the energy from the sun can be utilized, also materials can be recycled and products can be built with recycling in mind to make it easier to recycle materials? In addition about 50% to 70% of fossil fuel energy simply produces waste heat with about 40% of fossil fuel energy on average producing useful work. In addition a smaller and smaller quantity of energy is being used per unit of economic output in the World.
Dennis, how much solar and wind would be built without any fossil fuel extraction and use??
Answer none.. We need to use fossil fuels to mine, process the materials to usable form then the manufacturing process at factories.
We use fossil fuels at every stage, with no-one attempting to make them differently!!
You want a whole lot more, so it’s a lot more fossil fuel use than if we didn’t build any.
How useful is solar energy at 4AM anywhere in the world?? Even with 4 hours of ‘storage’?? how about 6 hours of storage?? What happens when there is a cloudy day or 2 without wind, when we have no fossil fuel backup??
How do you build a solar panel farm without any plastic?
You miss the point that we have a system and the whole lot is important for the system to function ‘normally’, so we can make solar panels and wind turbines.
The products are just as important as the burnt materials. Ignoring them as irrelevant to ‘energy use’ is a lack of systems understanding. We can’t turn all the product from one well into either products or combustibles, we get both.
What would you have the fossil fuel industry do, re-bury 75-80% (rough percentage) of what they extract?? Doesn’t that make the extraction of ‘product’ incredibly expensive raising the cost of building solar and wind anyway, because they use lots of plastics and distribute it all on bitumen roads??
You don’t get it at all, we can only have increases in solar, wind and battery production while we keep getting increases in fossil fuel use as we have had on a decadal scale. It’s why fossil fuels still make up 85% of all energy use down only 1% in the last 17 years…
Reality is, use the real numbers, not the massaged ones that ignore the energy content of very real and important products, that renewables do NOT provide at all.
Hideaway, the working wind and solar replace some of the fossil fuel being burned to produce electricity, electric powered cars and trucks and railroads can be used in place of ICEVs also reducing fossil fuel use. The fossil fuel that is conserved by doing this can be utilized as material inputs where needed, the acceleration in declining output of fossil fuels will occur because there is a lack of demand for fossil fuel as most of its use as energy will be rapidly replaced in the future.
Human population will peak around 2055 and begin to gradually decline as women choose to have smaller families, this will reduce the need for economic growth as population declines. More material will be recycled in the future reducing the need for mining, especially as products start to be designed with recycling in mind, making it easier to accomplish.
The energy content of all produced fossil fuel is included in primary energy numbers.
When the Energy Institute finds energy consumption of natural gas, they simply take all of the natural gas sold on the World market regardless of whether it is used for producing a petrochemical or is burned in a home heating system or consumed at an electric power plant.
‘You don’t tax the rich’
-Trump
“How did the GOP become the party of cranks, crackpots and fruitcakes?”
Lets not degrade cranks, crackpots, and fruitcakes by comparing them to Repugs.
And here’s the future of EV big rigs
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/electric-vehicle-rule-california-diesel-trucks-kamala-harris-joe-biden-13f59663?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s
Won’t work because the don’t work. Can’t replace diesel unless you’re Amish.
The goal isn’t to save the planet it’s to save this industrial way of life that leaving us we’re not leaving it.
An alternative view on Heavy duty truck BEVs
https://electrifynews.com/news/work-evs/u-s-market-for-heavy-duty-electric-freight-trucks-growing-fast-in-2024/
It only works when it works for these companies. Rome was not built in a day, it is said.
Dennis. Where are you at regarding Tesla given what Elon Musk has morphed into politically?
Musk appears to have lost his mind. Probably doesn’t affect Tesla much. They may lose a few buyers who hate his ideas, and gain a few who like them.
Not a fan of Musk, he seems to have lost his mind. The cars I own work great, but would probably not buy another simply because he is so hateful. The article I linked mentions several different producers of Heavy duty trucks, the Tesla might be best currently, though I have not researched in detail.
Many Tesla owners are opting to sport BMW or Audi emblems. It’ll fool most, and spare thou some shame. Those observant enough to see what you’re doing will understand.
They’re being forced into the market likely at a huge financial loss.
“ACT requires OEMs selling medium- and heavy-duty vehicles to sell zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) or near-zero-emissions vehicles (NZEVs), such as plug-in electric hybrid vehicles as a growing percentage of their annual sales, increasing from 2024 to 2035. A cap-and-trade system is used, capping the number of fossil-fuel-burning vehicles sold by mandating annual sales percentage requirements. Manufacturers comply by generating compliance credits by selling ZEVs or NZEVs or trading compliance credits.”
Where do the profits come from to cover the costs? ICE !!!
Looking at this from a global perspective, here is the problem being faced by vehicle manufacturers in the west. Let’s look at this article:
Irizar e-mobility to deliver 1,000th electric bus (and provides 2 vehicles to carrier La Veloz in Madrid)
So in September 2024 this Spanish outfit is celebrating the production of it’s 1,000th bus. In the meantime:
Yutong: the Chinese leader on worldwide expansion (as electric buses gain ground)
In one week one Chinese bus manufacturer could supply the entire annual needs of the Italian market! Got that? In 2018 Yutong manufactured 24 times as many electric buses as Irizar made in 8 years between 2018 and September 2024! Yutong uses these batteries from CATL:
New commercial vehicles’ battery launched by CATL with Yutong, with “lifespan of up to 15 years and 1.5 million km”
Does anybody in the west have anything that can compete with these batteries from CATL? If you don’t think the west has a problem then I want some of whatever it is that you’re smoking! From my neck of the woods, I am seeing the beginnings of a tsunami of Chinese made vehicles and my gut feeling is that they are going to put pressure on every western manufacturer selling vehicles around here.
Trucks with names like Shacman, Foton, Sinotruk (Howo) and JAC are now common sights on the streets of Jamaica. These are new trucks that are displacing sales from western and Japanese brands. The same thing goes for buses. The capital city bus fleet used to be all VDL (Volvo) buses from Belgium. The operator id struggling to keep the VDL buses in operation and the government has bought more than 150 buses from Chinese brands Golden Dragon and Ankai. If you take a vacation in Jamaica and take a Shuttle bus to your hotel, the bus will be a Golden Dragon, a Yutong, a king Long or a Higer.
We are starting to see more and more new brands of cars on the streets too. Great Wall Motors, Geely, BYD, Changan, Beijing, Haval and Jetour are all brands I’m sure you are familiar with (NOT!).
For a better sense of what is available in China, take a look at the stuff in the following link. US and European readers will face steep tariffs if they attempt to import any of the more than 150 vehicles listed!
https://fordreamauto.com/search-cars/?condition=brand-new-cars
Finally, look at where the Chines market is headed:
Chinese car accounted for 67% of the world’s new energy vehicles sales, January – August 2024
Thanks IB. “China is on track to become the first electrostate” ~ RethinkX?
JT,
Tesla doesn’t make ICEVs and would be fine without subsidies as long as they have a level playing field.
Dennis
That was a direct quote from the article you sent. Take it up with the author.
The subsidy comments were your speculations, right?
“Manufacturers comply by generating compliance credits by selling ZEVs or NZEVs or trading compliance credits.”
Tesla makes money (billions, IIRC) selling compliance credits to legacy auto companies (they have extra credits because they have no gas vehicles to offset them against). They would likely do the same thing in the truck market.
Ya gotta love the way the WSJ article blames “Kamala Harris’s California” for restricting sales and places a videoad that she paid for right after the first paragraph. The paywall hit right after that.
The Fat Boy does have his options:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*Y0wRamlzzoU0bwODERSnUA.jpeg
Here is a little dose of reality for the climate change proponents.
https://x.com/thecoffeesfresh/status/1843200537384399192
Senator John Kennedy. There is a longer version and Kennedy states his position on all energy sources. I like this guy- he is straight talking.
Whatever your belief is about climate change it should be borne in mind that the IPCC is often misquoted and that much of the claims to date are not based on unequivocal evidence. They are theories.
I am ALL for energy conservation. I cannot see why people want to buy 400kW BEV pick up trucks and cars.
I guess I had now better retire to my bunker.
“Renewable power is on pace to produce close to half of the electricity used globally by 2030, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, which finds that in nearly every country large wind and solar plants are the cheapest forms of new power.
Between now and 2030, the world will add more than 5,500 gigawatts of renewable capacity — what amounts to the total current capacity of China, India, the U.S., and the EU combined, according to the report. Solar will account for most of the growth.”
However, they also forecast
-Nevertheless, renewables’ share in transport only increases by two percentage points to 6% in 2030.
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2024/executive-summary
Thanks Hickory. Too bad all renewables are EROEI negative, at least according to Hideaway (although he may have changed his mind on that – didn’t I see him recently quote solar EROEI at maybe +2? I’m confused…)
John Norris, I have consistently stated that solar and wind cannot power our modern civilization that requires an EROEI of 10-15/1 at least. My own calculations have an EROEI of around 2 before we include any storage or backup.
Industrial processes run 24/7 to be as efficient as possible, so solar and wind by themselves cannot power these processes, without a huge reduction in efficiency. The single best example of this is the new Haru oni plant that has been built to make synthetic fuel from wind power alone. the expected output was 130,000 litres/yr, yet after it reached ‘commercial production’ (their terminology), so after the start-up period working out all the wrinkles in the processes, it only managed to produce 24,000 litres over 8 months, an annual rate of 36,000 litres.
This is from one of the best wind resources in the world with a 70% capacity factor. Their process efficiency from wind energy in to synthetic fuel out is 1.6%, while they buy in their CO2. The original numbers were to capture CO2 from the air, but they ran out of money to include that step. (It would also lower their efficiency even further!!).
Notice that Hickory has again highlighted the lie that everyone wants to believe in….
” International Energy Agency, which finds that in nearly every country large wind and solar plants are the cheapest forms of new power.”
If that was true, then every Aluminium company would immediately decide to take their smelters off-grid and power them with their own solar and wind as it would give them a competitive advantage over every company relying on fossil fuel generated electricity, plus all the grid connection and transmission fees.
Yet reality shows no-one anywhere in the world is setting up a new Aluminium smelters to take advantage of all the cheaper solar and wind energy. So either none of the Aluminium producers wants to make a commercial killing, or the narrative about solar and wind being the cheapest electricity is not accurate..
Hideaway…no wind facility gets a 70% capacity factor. Give us the data link to that if I am wrong.
The best numbers I have seen are in the mid 40’s (big offshore facilities). Lets get some the facts right.
comment- you seem to have a very big bias to your proclamations, which makes it very hard to take seriously. Bias makes people hang onto false assumptions despite contrary evidence. Which is too bad because you have have some perspectives worth taking into account…especially about the long run.
If people thought you were a straight shooter they might actually hear what you are saying better. I try to challenge myself to digest evidence whether or not it fits with my preconceived notions or desired outcome. Not perfect, but it is healthy process. And the process is why I value some of the perspectives and facts shared here.
pg 18 of this presentation by Siemens Energy who supplied the wind turbine….
http://www.fze.uni-saarland.de/AKE_Archiv/DPG2021-AKE_Online/Vortraege/DPG2021_AKE1.2_Tremel_Hydrogen-and-Efuel.pdf
“Strong winds throughout the year Capacity factor ~70%”
I would have worked with whatever number they claimed. It is one of the windiest places that’s habitable on the planet…..
Thanks. A rare location indeed.
Iirc, both IEA and EIA have a habit of badly underestimating renewable energy in their forecasts.
Nick G and Hickory,
I have no idea of your backgrounds but both of you seem to believe everything that you read on the internet is the gospel according to sol called green energy; it seems to me that you have no experience in the “field” getting your hands dirty. The IEA and EIA are both highly politicized, especially the IEA. All the good guys have left and now new guys follow the Upton Sinclair method of selective data analysis so that it fits the climate narrative dictated by influencers lobbying for green energy ( i.e. they are defending their salary). For a number of years I peer reviewed the IEA World Energy Outlook, then suddenly the green blob invaded the IEA and I was persona non-grata because I challenged some of the assumptions. Not that I care because my salary is independent of my opinions and I am not prepared to believe everything I read as accurate ( Michael Mann’s work is one). There is far too much cognitive bias on renewable energy and the claims rarely match reality. I am not against renewables- I have a large tracking PV array and battery storage but it has its limitations and will never pay out and I did much of the civil engineering myself.
Both Hideaway and JT have both provide a much needed balance. Try reading and assimilating their musings, because they are right on the money. The Haru Oni plant is a joke. E-Fuels will never happen at scale- all they need is a continuous subsidy. I look forward to the first aluminium smelter powered by wind and solar; I think it will be a very long wait though.
Carnot-
“E-Fuels will never happen at scale”
I tend to agree with that, and I’ll add that bio-fuels are generally an ecologically disaster and is a thermodynaically very weak attempt at liquid fuel production (poor net energy yield). And yet the diversion of prime lands to biofuels in the world is massive. Solar could easily replace that biofuel transport energy with something like 1% of the land area.
Yet the wealthiest will pay a lot to get aviation fuels for their pleasure.
And military forces will do whatever it takes to get fuel-
One jet fighter in the air for an hour might use the biofuel output from a 800 acres of prime farmland …no I have not attempted to calculate the actual value.
Consider- if a corn and soybean farmer of 1000 acres in Iowa could divert 80 acres of the land to mixed PV/sheep and from that fraction generate enough liquid fuel for on farm operations such as plowing and harvest of the rest…just how motivated do you think they will be in 2037 to get that system deployed? This may not be “at scale”, nonetheless it would be meaningful on a local level. ‘Meaningful on a local level’ is a big deal.
Strong words for one who does not believe in thermometers.
Auke Hoekstra used to produce a chart showing just how badly off the IEA projections for new solar PV capacity additions per year. Yje image attached to this post is my very crude attempt to update it to 2023!
Islandboy, did you bother to find out if the above graph was true or not before posting it??
The WEO 2016 outlook is easily available and they had growth of solar at around 16% on average, go and check it out for yourself. It was below what actually happened but it still had additions of around 190Gw for 2023, which is still a steep rise even on your graph. They certainly didn’t have a decline in additions as your graph above clearly shows!!
This is the problem of the cornucopians always just showing any graph or information that supports their argument, even when clearly false with a bit of research….
I have no reason to believe Auke Hoekstra would deliberately put out blatantly false information especially when, as you say, the data is so readily available. So I downloaded this:
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/680c05c8-1d6e-42ae-b953-68e0420d46d5/WEO2016.pdf
I looked for “additions of around 190Gw for 2023” and could not find it. What I did find was the chart below which covers annual power capacity additions up to 2040 under the 450 Scenario. The 450 Scenario is more aggressive than the New Policies Scenario which is what Auke Hoestra used for his chart. If you can tell me where exactly you found any suggestion of “additions of around 190Gw for 2023” I would appreciate it.
From the chart below, what the more aggressive 450 scenario projected for 2023 was about 64 GW. According to the IEA’s PVPS Snapshot of Global PV Markets 2024 ( https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Snapshot-of-Global-PV-Markets_20241.pdf ),
Hideaway,
The chart is PV capacity additions per year in GW. If we take the table for solar PV capacity from page 552 of the IEA-WEO 2016 and take the delta in capacity every 5 years and then divide by 5 to get capacity additions per year we get the chart below (first increment is 2014 to 2020 so for that we divide by 6 years).
So not false, you just did not read the chart carefully.
The point of the chart is a fairly simple one, that is accurate. The IEA’s WEO has consistently underestimated the annual growth rate of Solar PV capacity.
Here is the data on annual capacity additions for Solar PV from 2001 to 2023. So for 2023 the IEA WEO 2016 was off by about a factor of 7 (50 GW when actual was 350 GW). Last year’s WEO predicted that the 2023 level of capacity additions might be reached in 2026 in the Announced Pledges Scenario, so they may be getting a tad better.
World solar generation of electricity has grown at an annual rate of 21% over the 2018 to 2023 period.
Hickory asked earlier when renewables get to 50% of total energy, I don’t have that answer but for electricity wind and solar reach about half of power output by 2033 if current growth rates continue from 2024 to 2033.
For all energy use if recent growth rates continue for wind, solar, and total energy and other non-fossil fuel energy consumption remains at roughly the 2023 level, we get to 50% non-fossil fuel energy consumption by 2037. After 2037 I assume growth rates slow for wind and solar output, but 77% of total energy consumption is from non-fossil fuel by 2045.
Thanks for thinking about that Dennis…the 50% non-fossil supply question.
I think 2037 is as good a guess as any.
And at that point some places will still have access to enough fossil fuel, and perhaps by then there will be better end use management of the remaining supplies prioritizing more difficult to replace sectors of use.
I do think that we will see ‘canary in the coal mine’ regions where they are both short on fossil fuel importation capability and short on domestic non-fossil energy development well prior to 2037. We will get a glimpse of energy poverty…21st century style.
Energy poverty is tough on the economy, and tough on civil society. And its not just absolute energy poverty that can wreak havoc, its backsliding from from a high level of energy supply as well.
Here’s my best conservative guess about their latest projection. My guess is the orange curve.
The website I write for has a good short article about the unfeasibility of carbon capture and storage, for which I wrote this comment:
You quote Vaclav Smil, who has very memorably stated that the “four pillars of modern civilization” are: concrete, steel, ammonia, and plastics.
You cannot have any kind of infrastructure without concrete and steel, and you cannot have concrete and steel without oodles of diesel fuel (for mining) and coal (for kilns and smelting).
You cannot have a grain-based agriculture without ammonia (nitrogen fertilizer) and you cannot have ammonia without oodles of natural gas (to combine hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen).
You cannot have modern gadgets of any sort — medical, electronic, household, etc. — without plastics, and you cannot have plastics without oodles of petrochemical feedstocks from oil and gas.
Therefore, gigatons of CO2 emissions every year.
In other words, we have walked right into the goddamnedest of traps.
I find it highly amusing that the same folks who insist we can never go green in respect to mineral resources, energy, etc simply drop their argument having once made their point, at least to their own satisfaction.
They have very little to say about the consequences of depletion of such resources.
The consequences can be summed up in very few words…… the collapse of industrial civilization.
Framing any argument in terms of the continuation of business as usual over the next few generations is about as ignorant as believing in a flat earth.
We may manage to save a significant portion of our current industrial economy if we stay pedal to the metal in terms of efficiency, conservation, and capacity using renewable energy, recycling, etc.
Let’s at least pretend to be realistic in respect to collapse.
The population is going to shrink dramatically……. and it’s going to shrink before this century is out.
We’re going to be doing without quite a lot of things we take for granted today….. from air travel to cars and trucks that weigh a couple of tons or more to meat based diets to today’s fast food and consumer junk economy.
We’re not going to be needing new houses out the ying yang, or new highways or shopping malls or sports stadiums…… and we won’t be able to afford such things in any case.
But that’s ok because the existing stock of housing, stadiums, malls, and highways will be more than adequate, in general terms, once the shit is well and truly in the fan.
So………. the NEED for renewable energy can reasonably be expected to be no more than one fourth and probably less than we use per capita today. There may well be no more than one quarter as many people needing energy by the end of this century.
Survivors will adapt to the new circumstances in a hundred different ways.
Bottom line, between shrinking population and downsizing, there’s at least a very real possibility there will be enough raw material available to for survivors to pull thru the next few generations.
I personally believe that in fifty years, assuming good luck, no WWIII, lawyers and CPA’s will be commuting as necessary in micro mini electric cars with no more than forty or fifty miles range, if that much.
Ditto the same good luck scenario, the better built houses we live in today will be upgraded to net zero or better energy standards…… meaning exporting energy.
I could go on all day.
There may be no aluminum smelters running on nothing but wind and solar power , but smelters will be running on otherwise surplus renewable electricity to a substantial extent…. because we’re going to overbuild wind and solar capacity.
We’re going to be drinking locally brewed beer…… because putting it in aluminum cans and hauling it hundreds of miles is going to be too expensive at some point. There’s water anyplace there’s a market for large quantities of beer…… no need to haul it from one place to another. Just hauling the grain, etc, will be sufficient.
We can and will go back to wearing durable clothing……… and a pair of blue jeans, properly manufactured and well cared for, will last a couple of years in daily use.
We can and likely will have laws mandating iron clad durability standards for most big ticket consumer goods such as stoves, refrigerators, etc. They’ll be fixable and be fixed, rather than scrapped, as is the usual case today.
“They have very little to say about the consequences of depletion”
Of course. Really, they’re just arguing for drill, baby, drill. They’re defending the oil & gas industry. They may also be genuinely afraid of what the loss of O&G will look like for the world, but if so they’re just operating inside their BAU box. unable to imagine alternatives.
Nick …. ” Really, they’re just arguing for drill, baby, drill. ”
No, it’s you who are arguing for drill baby drill, if you want huge amounts of metals and minerals to keep industrial civilization going, plus all the extra renewables and batteries you want mean growth in those sectors, with new processing, smelting, manufacturing plants all over the world, churning out huge extra quantities of rebuildables…
That all entails more oil, more coal and more gas to make it happen, more jobs and higher standards of living on average for people in Indonesia to mine more Nickel and Aluminium, with the associated industrial plants…
In the last 2 decades we have added around 10 times more fossil fuel use to the overall system than solar and wind. We only get huge expansions of solar and wind by growing the overall system, so it’s your plan to expand fossil fuels to build it all, and you don’t even realise it yourself…
I’m fine with less fossil fuel use starting today, reducing by 10-20% per year, are you?? Of course this will crash modern civilization fairly quickly, but it’s the only way to meet climate goals. We are going to crash industrial civilization anyway, so may as well do it sooner than later, while more of the natural world remains….
Hideaway,
You have the courage to say it the way it is, the end of hope. Now all kinds of faith-based propositions are
distorting reality, add the complexity of the issues plus the intellectual laziness of the masses and here we go, drill baby drill. LOL
Not to mention the Americans propensity for exuberant energy use.
Thank you!
“I’m fine with less fossil fuel use starting today, reducing by 10-20% per year, are you??”
No, I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think you really think so either – something more like a 5-7% reduction per year would make more sense (anything more would require a WWII kind of mobilization, and that’s not really in the realm of possibility at the moment, in part because of the kind of FF industry resistance to change that we’re seeing right here). Even if I did I wouldn’t propose it, because I know that it’s a non-starter, and would simply reduce the credibility of those who are pushing for a transition away from fossil fuels.
And, I suspect that people who do talk loudly about it know that too, and that loss of credibility is precisely what they want.
Really, I think you’re too smart (and have too much technical education and experience) not to know perfectly well what you’re saying is nonsense – you’re just trying to clutter up the space, and confuse people.
Fortunately you’re fighting a seriously losing cause. Even ExxonMobil has said publicly that net-zero is both desirable and practical. They’re not all that committed to doing more than the minimum they can get away with, but they know they have to acknowledge what the entire scientific community has said.
It’s similar to the major car companies – they know they have to transition to electric, but they’re stalling as long as they can (inside the companies, too many people only know ICEs, and are afraid of being obsolete; outside, the dealers are terrified of losing their service revenue). Heck, they’d have done nothing if not forced to by Tesla first, and then China second. But…they’re moving…
Nick … “No, I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think you really think so either – something more like a 5-7% reduction per year would make more sense”
Exxon have a fairly new report out showing a 15% decline in oil production without investment, which is why I picked that number.
You have just admitted it’s you that wants drill baby drill to continue to try and maintain a modern civilization.
At some point we get the large declines in oil production, because of depletion. It’s a fact and not fiction. All drill baby drill does is put off the day of reckoning by a few years, until decline in production is inevitable anyway.
Why not stop investment into all fossil fuels now, invest all that money into renewables to stave off collapse?
Answer… Without MORE fossil fuels we wont be able to do the mining, processing and manufacturing of the renewables growth, just like it has been for the last 20-30 years.
If you want solar to grow from 530TW or whatever it is today to 1,530TW of installation in X years time, that is an EXTRA 16M tonnes of Aluminium for the frames and structures, an extra 60M tonnes of flat glass, an extra 8M tonnes of plastics and polymers, an extra 5.5M tonnes of copper, etc, etc… This is all per annum!!
Do you then want it to all grow MORE???
The new Aluminium smelters, to provide cheap Aluminium are based in Indonesia by burning more coal. About 1.6M tonnes of extra coal will be burnt to provide just 500,000 tonnes of new Aluminium, so for the extra 16M tonnes we’ll need to burn and extra 52M tonnes…
How does any of this help the climate or species extinctions?? It doesn’t at all, it helps keep modern civilization going for a bit longer before we crash from a higher height of energy use.
It is you and every promoter of growing a lot more renewables that is in favor of drill baby drill but doesn’t realise it!!
Hideaway’s observations are profound and should have its own term. I propose “The Renewables Paradox.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13944729/Putin-nuclear-war-Ukraine-president-catastrophic-consequences.html
Dennis, remember when I said that Russia may use tactical nukes because Ukraine was attacking their oil infrastructure.
U said that was a ridiculous idea.
“Months after the invasion in 2022, the US uncovered evidence of ‘highly sensitive, credible conversations inside the Kremlin’ that the Russian President could use nukes to avoid major battlefield losses, according to journalist Bob Woodward.”
“US intelligence reportedly pointed to a 50 per cent chance that Putin would use tactical nukes if Ukrainian forces surrounded 30,000 Russian troops in the southern city of Kherson.”
All fun and jokes! Keep up the great work on the site!!
If you want to rely on Woodward’s book, you should buy it and read it.
The Daily Mail is a right-wing rag, and not to be trusted for the weather.
“The Daily Mail is a right-wing rag, and not to be trusted for the weather.”
But the daily half-naked Kardashian photos are great!
Will it be Kim, Chloe, Kourtney, Kylie, Kendall, Bruce Jenner sorry Caelen Jenner, their Mom, etc etc every other day
Bob Woodward no credibility??? Watergate?
I have no problem with Woodward. OTOH, I wouldn’t rely on anything the Mail might say about his book.
They were direct quotes from Woodward Book.
Daily Mail is 80/20 hybrid between entertainment and journalism.
But I find that they uncover stories that others don’t. Like the one above.
You certainly shouldn’t just blindly trust it.
Kind of like Zerohedge. They make money on trying to scare you. But they find things that others don’t.
But don’t just blindly trust.
Andre,
Woodward does excellent work in my view, dailymail, not so much. I believe I said that I thought Putin would not be stupid enough to use nukes. People are often more stupid than I realize. Nuclear weapon fallout will hurt Russian citizens if the wind is blowing northeast.
Fair enough. I just wanted to point out my idea wasn’t ridiculous.
I agree the Daily Mail does not stress evidence. But they do offer stories that other sites do not (like Zerohedge)
You can do your own research and evidence gathering to draw your own conclusiob.
I agree Woodward is the last of a dying breed of great journalism.
Keep up your great work on this site Dennis!
“Trump called a ‘pig’ by core voter demographic”
Lets not demonize pigs by comparing them to Trump
Up above Hideaway said to Dennis-
“All the natural resources on Earth, including coal, oil, gas, wind, sunshine, moving water are free to humanity to use as we see fit. It’s a concept you continue to not understand. The ‘cost’ of any aspect of it is what we humans charge one another. It’s a totally artificial man made concept.”
It would be nice if that was true. In the world I live you have to pay a price to harness and consume those energy sources,
and also we all pay a non-dollar price in the destructive side effects the process. As does the very biosphere within which we exist.
“This whole thing should probably be illegal—so quick, give us your money before they change the law!”
Who will be in control of AI enabled government? We are on the verge folks.
-https://www.gcsp.ch/publications/digital-authoritarianism-how-digital-technologies-can-empower-authoritarianism-and
-https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ai-poses-risks-both-authoritarian-and-democratic-politics
-https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2023/repressive-power-artificial-intelligence
-https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-ai-tocracy-emerges-0713
Shallow Sand asked Dennis what he thought about Elon Musk. As I see it, he will do anything it takes to enable his business interests. He is like the industrialists who supported Hitlers rise to power. Yet he is much more powerful with the development/ownwership of his Neuralink, Robotics, xAI, Starlink satellite, and Twitter. Talk about a loose cannon, with a loose grasp on right and wrong. He recently referred to hate speech and disinformation on Twitter as people ‘just having fun’. How long will it take before you understand that these destructive forces are ‘having fun’ at your expense, at the expense of your family, and at the expense of civil society?
I hope people vote for the person with the better character…regardless of any particular issue. With the emergence of AI we are at a critical moment in the history of the world.
A new Open Thread Non-Petroleum has been posted.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-october-12-2024/
The June Non-OPEC and World Oil Production update has been posted.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/june-non-opec-world-oil-production/