On the Airwaves and InterTubes

News & Current Events Public News & Current Events
,
21

Vanityfox, I’ll watch the Kunstler video later tonight, I’m at work now. Regarding the rare earths necessary to make the EV’s, the new AC induction motors don’t use rare earths.
There’s lots of lithium in South America, China and Utah. I’ll agree that it’s going to be a challenge to get that much metal. But what’s the alternative? Somehow finding enough fossil fuels to pull out of the ground? What’s the difference? Fossil fuels or metals? The difference is that metals can be recycled and reused indefinitely while fossil fuels are gone forever when you burn them.

You question how much money it’s going to take to finance a hundred million Chevy Volts. Yes, I agree with you, this will be prohibitive. But alternatively, how much will it take to finance another 40 years of US hegemony to take by force all the remaining fossil fuels in the world? When the dollar collapse, will the US even be ABLE to do this? So it’s impossible, there simply isn’t enough energy available to the US to continue its insane growth spiral based on fossil fuels. It will end soon, whether Washington wants it to or not. Therefore, we should be spending what little resources we have left on getting off fossil fuels, not pulling more out of the ground.

I don’t really disagree with you, the future is going to be ugly. I think we should pull the bandaid off now wrt fossil fuels. Further subsidizing their price is only going to make things worse.

22

Hello Mark,

Most existing modern induction motors for the modern car industry and for wind turbine application are using Neodymium or Samarium–cobalt , commonly known widely as Rare-Earth Magnets. They’ve replaced Alnico and Ferrite magnets where extremely strong permanent magnetic application is needed. For example, the electric motors of each Toyota Prius requirie 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of neodymium I can confirm. The Prius also uses terbium and dysprosium, added in smaller amounts to the alloy to preserve neodymium’s magnetic properties at high temperatures. Yet another rare earth metal, lanthanum, is a major ingredient where 10 to 15 kilograms is used in hybrid batteries per Prius. The complex mining process for these substances are highly fossil fuel intensive. Set against Peak Oil you can really see the dynamic that removes a viable EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested).

I cannot fathom how even a sixteenth of the 244 million cars and (more importantly) food transportation trucks in the United States are going to be replaced over the next 25 years with even partial duel electric/fossil fuel propulsion methods, if three quarter’s of the fossil fuel that runs the US economy are being imported from deminishing foreign oil fields at an established global decline rate of 6.7%, or a little over 10 years before the world is producing 50% of the sweet-crude output currently available today.

To the people that have appreciated my appraisal of Chris Martenson’s Crash Course along this thread post for post, I can only hope you haven’t lost hope with these clearly laid out facts that have proven to me over these past years of studying the fine print and detail that complex technology isn’t going to save the day even with war fought, high fossil fuel input to create the transition splice. It is all so very late in the day when considering …

… Time, Scale and Cost …

In regard to the alternative prospects still on offer, I choose a self-sustaining walkable and local small town close-knit community, over a collosal complex multi-million populated city where all natural ecological diverse resource within them have all but completely disapeared, requiring vast input from elsewhere to maintain them.

~ VF ~

23

Vanityfox, I never said that the Prius didn’t use rare earths (and I know you never said I did…). But my quick google search confirms what I have already said, that the new AC induction motors do not use rare earths. The Tesla Roadster uses none in its motor.http://renewablegossip.com/rare-earth-metals-avoided-by-toyota-and-tesla/
http://www.evworld.com/news.cfm?rssid=25021
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/induction_motors
And if we really do need them, let’s just re-open the California mine.
We don’t disagree that much in the end, I just went off on a rant when I heard Chris say that we don’t yet have vehicles capable of running without fossil fuels, because we do, and I have one (hopefully installing the batteries this weekend).
I agree that we should be walking and biking more. What I strongly disagree with is the situation we are in where current car manufacturers are dedicating their manufacturing capacity to cranking out gasoline powered cars and every political commentater and his dog is ready to scream bloody murder the instant someone suggests that carmakers should be forced to produce x% electric cars per year or that EV’s should have extensive subsidies or tax advantages to help level the mass-production field of competition with ICE’s that have already had 100 years to develop, in the name of some free market competition evangelism, when at the same time every other market is subsidized to high heaven, including fossil fuels, which is one of the worst offenders. The hypocricy is staggering. And that we should be extracting as much fossil fuels out of the ground as we can in order to extend the ponzi scheme for as long as we can, when a crash is inevitable anyways.
And the other thing, all those food delivery trucks you mention that can’t be converted over to electric fast enough, they could easily be converted over to run on natural gas which is the next best thing… since you know what I have to say about natural gas…

24

[quote=GregRoberts]

http://www.24hgold.com/english/news-gold-silver-book-review-chris-martenson-s-crash-course-.aspx?article=3461878568G10020&redirect=false&contributor=John+Rubino [/quote]

Greg, thanks for the link to the great review of Chris’s CC Book!  John Rubino (Dollar Collapse) does a nice job.  I really like how he opens the review, setting what I think is a critical context for people who are just being introduced to Chris’s work:

The first thing to understand about Chris Martenson, the respected financial consultant and commentator, is that he's a PhD in pathology who is, as a result, very comfortable with complex, technical ideas. He's also a clear, concise writer. In Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future Of Our Economy, Energy, And Environment he'll toss off sentences like "Money is a tertiary abstraction that gets its meaning from real forms of wealth," and by the time a reader sees this, the meaning is both clear and profound because Martenson has done such a good job of laying out the necessary building blocks.

Great review!
25

Hello Mark,

Every word that you’ve written is in the most part the truth, and I thank you for that. Why, then, are such genius relegated to a minority in the public imagination? Why does the American public still pay for a government that has expanded its girth by a factor of three in thirty years, along with a military infrastructure to a size beyond the scope of my imagining? Why aren’t these leader’s given the freedom to help the American public power-down and move away from fossil fuel, and embrace the future with a transition toward alternative and sustainable energy resource?

Where did the ethanol twin tank tap disappear to on the Ford Model T production line in answer to prohibition, where a car could once travel across prairie land filling up from a farmers distilliary, only to be criminalized to the point where many hundreds of Texaco petrol Station’s dotted the highways as a legalized form of taxation?

Why were the electrified trams of Chicago and New York bought up by Standard Oil and dismantled, only to be replaced by petrolium powered GM buses, with numatic tyres that require 6 gallons of oil to make just one?

What was the necessity to kill diversity and to create dead centre syndrome where cities were once walkable, building many millions of vast suburbs on green-belt farmland, with long gas pipes and long electrical cables to power them, with highways for automobiles and lack of subsidised public transport - now a train system fitting for Bulgaria in what was the “Greatest Country In The World!!!”???

What then of the near 15 million barrels of imported oil to maintain the illusion of diversity every day now, with 14,000 crumbling bridges, highways filling with pot-holes, and a national debt off out of the stratosphere?

Here we play Mark, writing on the pages of one of the very best forums I’ve ever had the pleasure to both read and write in, yet just 6806 topics have been written within it, of its 4+ years, of which at this time of writing, 80712 posts have been written by just 45,747 registered users. If 10 times as many of that 45,747 registered users were readers here every day, that is still under half a million people paying attention to what we have written to each other, a quarter of which are from other countries around the world.

Every day I hope that what is written in this forum makes a difference to someone somewhere who has the power to change the course of where we are heading. Yet every day so far, with all the brightly brilliant answer’s to our plight, the world just keeps on revolving at an ever increasing and destructive pace …

We then, are the change …

Kindest Regards,

Paul

26

So, tell me Mark…   HOW do you charge those batteries?
I might add, I do loads of sustainable stuff too.  BUT, you and I may be able to do this, but how will the other millions around us do it too?  It’s simply not possible, which is why I got in first!
Mike