Of course any waste processing facilities that protect us from the impact of the mountains of waste we generate will slowly be abandoned. If you drive along third world coasts where they can’t afford waste treatment, you can see human turds bobbing in the serf. Have you seen pictures of the wastelands where they are dumping discarded (often unused) fashion clothing in the third world?
If you have a septic system, make sure you have consumables well stocked. And if you have a shallow well (or surface water) expect problems from neighbors who can no longer afford to treat their sewage and other wastes. Drill the deepest well you can afford and case to prevent inflow from higher aquifers it passes through.
Not virtue signalling. Pure profit motive. You get lots of money and prestige from running these nonsense projects. You can’t convince a may if his paycheck depends on ignoring the obvious.
The world is populated with stark naked mini-emperors. Cancel culture is weaponized against the clear-eyed who would dare to point out such nonsense.
NOT without dropping birth rates and immigration. As soon as folks from low-consumption cultures cross into the US or EU, they adopt the same wasteful lifestyle AND compound with larger families.
So was Gault/Rand right? Are the useless elite manipulators indeed so powerful that even the most productive resisters can no longer take their own lives back - let alone the peons on main street? Are the Silicon Valley Borg right? Is resistance futile? Therefore, it’s ok to just destroy civilization, emiserating everybody? That sounds a lot like the Davos banksters.
Rand pretended that the Gault/Ragnar/Francisco cabal were individualists, but in fact they had each other for support and to bounce ideas around. Then you see Reardon and Dagny, both left standing alone in a hostile world with NO support. Well, says an arrogant Gault - we won’t tell you the truth about our plan - you have to figure it out for yourselves. Except, Gault didn’t do it by himself - the three of them and his philosophy professor kicked the ideas around for years - but Hank and Dagny didn’t get invited into their club. They were left wandering in the wilderness.
Emiseration is a terrible thing. Lack of hope saps energy and inhibits problem solving. Rand believed people who give up in despair are a lower form of life. My grandmother taught me a similar thing - the lower classes shouldn’t expect to win, but you never stopped fighting. She also died well before her time of the accumulated stress of that struggle.
In Chris’s talk with Simon M, I heard the same arrogance - a bunch of elites were going to run off to their sanctuary for 10 years and the rest of us could freeze in the dark. Yes, I agree, the toxic Masses forming on both the left and right ought to be left to reap what they sow. But there are a lot of honest, honorable people out in middle America who would contribute to a solution if they were offered a small part in the effort. They’re often not smart enough or educated properly to be able to generate solutions on their own and they aren’t confident self-starters. Many of them may have practical life experience to offer and they could be willing hands to run local trials. By excluding them from resistance planned by affluent elites they are consigned to slow death by despair. Eventually, as cancel culture and other totalitarian solutions become stronger, they will be forced to give in to the most powerful mass in order to survive. Rand would have criticized them. Once I had a child, I realized that I would no longer engage in risky resistance because I didn’t have the right to risk my children’s life. While it’s true I risk my children’s long-term future by keeping my head down, I can’t decide to risk their immediate future until they are both able to make such decisions for themselves AND to survive on their own when I get cancelled.
Hi Barbara, Not sure what you mean by, “producing hydrogen to power my fuel cell”. That isn’t how it works. In the case of hydrogen as a replacement for gasoline it is all about EROEI, (Energy Returned On Energy Invested), when you consider that petroleum is (hopefully) greater than 1:1 and hydrogen starts out at less than 1:1. There is no known way to get more energy from a unit of hydrogen than it takes to produce that unit.
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I honestly don’t understand.
FACT CHECK: The Energy Transition is NOT running out of minerals!
Have you ever played "The Substitution Game?” EG: “Can you make X without Y?” For example - “Can you make solar without tellurium?” Google it. Run through all the Critical Minerals of concern for solar. Then rinse and repeat with all the technologies and all the minerals. Try it for solar, wind, batteries, electric motors, electric generators, household wiring, etc. You’ll soon find, as I did, that the substitution range is ENORMOUS and quickly takes every technology in the energy transition to vastly abundant resources. Wind and solar and EV’s and grid storage all have brands developing new technologies that no longer rely on rare earths or Critical Minerals. As some Critical Mineral or other gets rarer and more expensive, these other brands will cash in. The below is just for starters: a crash course in just a few alternatives and substitutes. I have no idea what the final state of these technologies will be in 20 years - as they are all changing so fast. But I know one thing in my bones. We will NOT run out of minerals for them!
SOLAR PANELS: 95% of solar panel brands are normal crystalline cells that already avoid ANY rare-earths or Critical Minerals by using silicon (which is 27% of the Earth’s crust) and aluminium (8%) and some silver or copper to send the electricity out. (But this can be replaced by aluminium if the copper ever gets scarce). Only 5% of the solar market are the thin film solar panels that require the rarer stuff like Gallium, Tellurium, Cadmium and Indium. They’re nice - but we don’t NEED them.
WIND TURBINES - are made from iron (5% of the earth’s crust), aluminium (8%) and recyclable fibreglass blades - that’s polyester resin and glass fibres. Wind generators WITHOUT rare-earth magnets are now a thing:- 15 MW Rare-Earth-Free Offshore Wind Turbine Seeks Path to Market | Offshore Wind Niron Magnetics: https://www.nironmagnetics.com/ This next one has radically reinvented their turbine so that instead of requiring servicing 4 times a year, those parts NEVER need servicing once installed. Sandia National Laboratories: News Releases : Propelling wind energy innovation
LITHIUM RESERVES: We have 22 million tons of lithium reserves. At 8kg per EV it’s enough for 2.75 BILLION EV’s, twice what we need.
GRID storage: Sodium batteries for the first 2 hours: then pumped hydro takes over. Sodium is 30% cheaper, operates in a much greater temperature range and is thermally stable (doesn’t suddenly burst into flames). There are over 100 TIMES the off-river pumped hydro sites we need worldwide. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/
ELECTRIC MOTORS: Valeo have a rare-earth free electric motor. https://www.valeo.com/en/catalogue/pts/high-voltage-rare-earth-free-electric-motor/
TESLA are working on one - prototype due mid 2024? New entry-level Tesla Compact EV design previewed by Carwow: everything you need to know | carwow
It’s a trend across the industry with Tesla, BMW, General Motors, Borgwarner, Jaguar & Land Rover, Tata, ZF, Vitesco, Renault, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Bentley, Marelli and Eurogroup Laminations all working on it. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automakers-suppliers-pushing-cut-rare-earths-evs-2023-11-14/
RECYCLING all these is getting more efficient. Unlike burning fossil fuels, once mined, all these minerals go into the industrial ecosystem to be recycled forever. “Black mass” from ground-up EV batteries is no longer a waste product to dispose of, but a sought after resource.
COPPER: We can replace it with aluminium. Aluminium is 1200 TIMES more abundant - 8% of the earth’s crust! Aluminium is less conductive so you have to have 25% thicker wires - but that doesn’t matter as it is half the price and weight. It can replace 90% of the functions of copper. How we can substitute aluminium for copper in the green transition
OTHER REFERENCES:- Wang et al Jan 2023 says we have enough minerals https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00001-6#
The IEA says we have enough but must encourage speed of mine approval Critical Minerals – Topics - IEA
Data scientist Hannah Ritchie of “Our world in data” and her own research says we have enough minerals - but there might be temporary shortages as we need to open more mines The world has enough minerals for low-carbon electricity
The bottom line? Once you replace Michaux’s ridiculous fancy-pants NMC batteries that are increasingly seen as luxury car EV batteries only with REAL grid batteries that the market WILL JUST CHOOSE soon because sodium doesn’t need copper inside but uses aluminium, and avoids other critical minerals - and once the market realises there is 100 TIMES the off-river pumped hydro we could need - and this is just like a coal plant - except instead of a turbine being pushed by millions of tons of coal and heat each year it’s being spun by water going up and down a hill - then you realise it. Michaux’s cherry-picked you into his story - the nightmare I call “The Batteries that ate the world!” And it’s just not likely now that sodium batteries are a commercial product. Sure - they’ll take a while to scale up. I’m not saying it will be perfectly smooth - but insisting we must backup the grid with 28 days German-level weather when MOST of the human race do not even experience WINTER - that’s some seriously bad math right there folks!
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