General > General Technical Chat
the dark side of cobalt
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: vad on July 15, 2023, 12:32:20 pm ---I beg your pardon, what better alternatives can replace fossil fuels now and in the foreseeable future?
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Heatpumps for heating, electric vehicles for transportation, wind and PV power, energy storage in flexible load management (e.g. heating loads), thermal storage, and to some extent, yes hydrogen too (but not in personal vehicles). All of this has already happened to the extent it's significant, and is already proven practical and possible. Note, there is nothing wrong in keeping using fossil fuels in supportive role, for example during dunkelflaute weeks. Significant reduction is all that's needed, both for climate and political stability of fossil fuels. Also price; now fossils can be used as an extortion mechanism.
Current situation is much better than people seem to assume, to the point of me being positive about it by simple extrapolation, even if assuming decrease in rate of change. We don't need to hope for exponential growth anymore, we are way beyond that point.
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: vad on July 15, 2023, 01:34:48 pm ---Let's say you decide to reduce energy consumption by a factor of 5, to get rid of dependency on fossil fuel energy sources. This would involve constructing houses that require 5 times fewer materials for building
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This sort of "cheese grate" approach where you grate off some fixed % from everything is absolutely stupid because you end up making sacrifices that are large, but do not produce significant gains.
For example, over the lifecycle of a house, energy spent burning fossil fuels to heat the house greatly outweighs the construction materials, so better insulate the house better to begin with. Or, a simple heating system change from fossil fuels to heatpump reduces energy use not by factor of five but pretty close, because a heatpump itself is a stored solar energy harvester.
Also we don't need such factor of 5 in reduction of energy consumption. We are quickly approaching a situation where half of our energy need is already supplied by renewables directly. Cut usage in half which happens with modest adoption of EVs and heatpumps (not every car / estate has to convert), and fossil use is down to one quarter, by simple math. Reality is much more complex of course but this is the ballpark and this is something which is happening within next 15-20 years or so.
Zero999:
--- Quote from: tom66 on July 10, 2023, 02:10:04 pm ---If you do the maths on the infrastructure required for EVs you will see that if every passenger car switched overnight we'd need approx 15-20% more electricity to be generated. That isn't nothing, but it's also not ridiculous to expect the grid to grow by such a size by 2040 or so by which time the vast majority of cars will be electric.
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Considerable investment in power distribution is required. The grid in many areas is struggling to cope with existing peak demand as it is. It would fall over way before everyone got an EV and a heat pump.
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 11:47:10 am ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 15, 2023, 11:29:15 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on July 15, 2023, 10:15:58 am ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on July 15, 2023, 08:23:35 am ---Fertiliser technology, greater agronomist understanding and automation in agriculture (one farmer can do so much more) surely also has a significant impact on crop yields.
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Very true. Most of the agricultural land is not used to the maximum yield that can be obtained due to inefficient / archaic farming.
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If the climate warms further, it will increase the amount of land which can be farmed, rather than reduce it. The panic about famines is unfounded. Higher temperatures means land which is too cold can be turned over to agriculture and a longer growing season,
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No. And the simple reason is that land needs to be prepared before it can be farmed. You'll need roads, drainage canals, removing debris / vegetation. And some land (like tundras) might not be suitable at all because it basically is a swamp when unfrozen. It is much more economic to try and keep farm land than making new. In the NL there are numerous land reclamation projects which took place over the last few centuries and for those projects it took decades before the land was actually useable.
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The warming is taking decades, if not centuries, which gives plenty of time to adjust our land usage. It's not going to all happen overnight.
--- Quote from: tom66 on July 15, 2023, 12:04:36 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 15, 2023, 11:29:15 am ---If the climate warms further, it will increase the amount of land which can be farmed, rather than reduce it. The panic about famines is unfounded. Higher temperatures means land which is too cold can be turned over to agriculture and a longer growing season, will enable a greater range of crops and more food to be grown within a year. Higher global temperatures result in increased global precipitation, so deserts will on average shrink, increasing the arable land further.
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There's no shortage of agricultural land though, so I don't view this as a positive outcome even if it were true. The problem with global hunger is one of infrastructure rather than farming. If the rest of the world's agricultural land was as productive as the West is with its, we'd easily be able to support a 10bn+ population with no one in hunger. Even more so if you reduced food waste, the average person wastes a ridiculous amount. But if you can't get food to the deepest parts of, say, Somalia, because of war and conflict, people are going to starve regardless.
--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 15, 2023, 11:29:15 am ---Of course we should be careful about how our actions affect the environment, but we need to avoid policies which will over-react and adversely affect economic growth. The health of the general population is linked to economic wealth. Richer countries have longer life expectancies and the death rate always increases after an economic downturn.
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Agreed, in general. The biggest issue with the climate change activists is they intersect very strongly with the anti-capitalists. There is a way to solve the problems of climate change and maintain our way of life, but it requires action now and not later. That is hard, but not impossible, to do with capitalism still in place. The idea that replacing capitalism with anything else would solve our problems is absolutely bonkers - especially given it essentially means that everyone agrees to significantly reduce their standard of living. Not happening in any democracy.
It's one of the reasons I'm constantly frustrated by statistics like "Apple pollutes X% of global emissions" ... without anyone apparently acknowledging that they, the consumer, bought a thing and caused that pollution.
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I think you've hit the nail on the head, when you talk about anti-capitalists pushing this. It's probably one of the main reasons why so many of those on the Right are suspicious of climate change. The likes of Greta and co. are just harming their cause, by attracting more of a right-wing backlash.
My may concern with government policies such as banning ICE vehicles is they will affect the poor most, completely antithetical to the Left's supposed goals. I would support boosting energy dependence, starting with fossil fuels, because it's relatively quick, then nuclear, which takes along time to come to fruition, as well as renewables. If electricity can be made cheap and clean, most people will adopt EVs and heat pumps in good time.
Marco:
If regulations don't force the transition nothing will happen. Some new very low extraction cost sourced can still be discovered, so from pure economics you will never get to net zero without force.
You could play pretend and say "well they can always do air capture" except that will never work economically, so then you're stuck with all these factories too big to fail.
PS. ICEs are not banned in the EU, they just will require detection circuitry for renewable fuels. A pyrrhic victory for ICEs, they will not be economical, just toys for the rich.
Zero999:
--- Quote from: Marco on July 15, 2023, 03:20:35 pm ---If regulations don't force the transition nothing will happen. Some new very low extraction cost sourced can still be discovered, so from pure economics you will never get to net zero without force.
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That's exactly why net zero is a bad idea. Most people will not vote for it. The only way to get it is authoritarianism. It's pointless anyway, since the countries aiming for it only produce a relatively small proportion of global emissions.
--- Quote from: Marco on July 15, 2023, 03:20:35 pm ---PS. ICEs are not banned in the EU, they just will require detection circuitry for renewable fuels. A pyrrhic victory for ICEs, they will not be economical, just toys for the rich.
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Running ICE vehicles off renewable fuels is not a sensible approach. Biofuels are less efficiency compared to solar cells and making synthetic fuel from electricity is very inefficient. I don't know what the EU policy is, but the UK want to ban new ICE cars by the end of the decade.
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