BlueIslandGirl
Pro-reality, nature is primary
New kinds of energy (e.g. generated by solar and wind and geothermal etc.) are *additive*. Meaning they do not replace fossil fuels, but rather add on to the total energy used. More energy => more growth, which then requires more energy to maintain.
Solar and wind require massive amounts of fossil fuels to make. E.g. silicon (a key component in solar panels) requires Carbon (C) for the basic chemical reaction required to strip Oxygen from Silica to make pure Silicon. Same with steel. That is why coal (carbon) is used in making silicon and steel. It is often used to generate the massive amounts of heat required to make these things too.
The Earth is finite and thus contains a finite amount of materials. It is not likely we will use all the oil, coal and gas contained in the Earth because at some point, it gets so difficult to get at, the energy required to get these things is more than the energy we will get from burning it. In other words the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) is <= 0. Typically an EROEI < 3 or so is not worth doing. Shale oil (fracking) and tar sands oil is the last of the "easily" accessible oil. After that's gone, there is no oil left to get with an EROEI > 0. Coal is plentiful and would probably last another couple hundred years but with very obvious downsides. Gas is plentiful, but extraordinarily polluting (methane!) for the atmosphere and, often, for water.
The Earth also contains finite amounts of materials like lithium, copper, graphite, cobalt, nickel, iron ore, and other materials used to make batteries, EVs, solar, wind, factories, bulldozers, etc. Copper grades were 40% 150 years ago, 4% 50 years ago, and are now 0.4%, meaning the amount of material that must be dug up and moved and filtered and chemically processed to retrieve the copper is exponentially rising. At some point it will be far too energy intensive to get the copper, even though we won't "run out" of copper (e.g. the entire Andes mountain range has copper in very low grades) any time soon.
Climate change is just one of many symptoms of ecological overshoot, what some are now calling the metacrisis. We have largely destroyed the habitats and wildlife of the planet; we have poisoned the entire planet (PFAs in every drop of water, microplastics also in every drop of water as well as the air we all breathe and the food we eat); and we've created a global economy that must grow at about 2% per year in order to keep the entire ponzi scheme of industrial civilization going. 2% growth has a doubling time of about 35 years, so that's why humanity has burned more fossil fuels (and emitted more CO2) in the past 35 years--since 1990--than it had in all the years up to 1990, and used more materials in that same period than in all time up to then. And we will do the same in the next 35 years to keep the global economy afloat. At some point of course, this will be impossible and the whole enterprise will crash.
Between the coming economic crash, the poisons in the environment, and the fraying of the web of life, it is unlikely humanity will last at anything like the current population for more than just a few more decades. My over-under on collapse is 2050. It seems likely there will be a world war sometime in the next few decades as we all scramble to deal with billions of refugees, catastrophic pollution, and massive shortages of food and clean water.
Solar and wind require massive amounts of fossil fuels to make. E.g. silicon (a key component in solar panels) requires Carbon (C) for the basic chemical reaction required to strip Oxygen from Silica to make pure Silicon. Same with steel. That is why coal (carbon) is used in making silicon and steel. It is often used to generate the massive amounts of heat required to make these things too.
The Earth is finite and thus contains a finite amount of materials. It is not likely we will use all the oil, coal and gas contained in the Earth because at some point, it gets so difficult to get at, the energy required to get these things is more than the energy we will get from burning it. In other words the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) is <= 0. Typically an EROEI < 3 or so is not worth doing. Shale oil (fracking) and tar sands oil is the last of the "easily" accessible oil. After that's gone, there is no oil left to get with an EROEI > 0. Coal is plentiful and would probably last another couple hundred years but with very obvious downsides. Gas is plentiful, but extraordinarily polluting (methane!) for the atmosphere and, often, for water.
The Earth also contains finite amounts of materials like lithium, copper, graphite, cobalt, nickel, iron ore, and other materials used to make batteries, EVs, solar, wind, factories, bulldozers, etc. Copper grades were 40% 150 years ago, 4% 50 years ago, and are now 0.4%, meaning the amount of material that must be dug up and moved and filtered and chemically processed to retrieve the copper is exponentially rising. At some point it will be far too energy intensive to get the copper, even though we won't "run out" of copper (e.g. the entire Andes mountain range has copper in very low grades) any time soon.
Climate change is just one of many symptoms of ecological overshoot, what some are now calling the metacrisis. We have largely destroyed the habitats and wildlife of the planet; we have poisoned the entire planet (PFAs in every drop of water, microplastics also in every drop of water as well as the air we all breathe and the food we eat); and we've created a global economy that must grow at about 2% per year in order to keep the entire ponzi scheme of industrial civilization going. 2% growth has a doubling time of about 35 years, so that's why humanity has burned more fossil fuels (and emitted more CO2) in the past 35 years--since 1990--than it had in all the years up to 1990, and used more materials in that same period than in all time up to then. And we will do the same in the next 35 years to keep the global economy afloat. At some point of course, this will be impossible and the whole enterprise will crash.
Between the coming economic crash, the poisons in the environment, and the fraying of the web of life, it is unlikely humanity will last at anything like the current population for more than just a few more decades. My over-under on collapse is 2050. It seems likely there will be a world war sometime in the next few decades as we all scramble to deal with billions of refugees, catastrophic pollution, and massive shortages of food and clean water.
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