From the abstract: "Most minerals required for the renewable energy transition have not been mined in bulk quantities before. Many of the technology metals already have primary resource mining supply risks.."
Not true. For a PV and storage based economy we need plastics, some lead and barium for perovskites, iron and aluminum for structures and machinery. Some sodium also. Some copper would be helpful for wiring. Storage can be iron-based, sodium-based, aluminum based or lithium based, as at present.
Apart from perhaps barium (for which there are many substitutes, some possibly better), none of these are rare or difficult to mine, and all are mined in large quantities.
The materials we need most of are already being mined in quantities greater than a PV-based society needs.
This paper suffers from the same problem that nearly everyone writing about this has: they assume the current situation is fixed, and we can't do anything different. Fossil fuel lobbyists have use this to argue that renewables are too expensive the whole way down their price curve. INET Oxford published a working paper with charts that nicely illustrate this "we're stopped!" fixation.[1]
The real problems we face are all political.
The physico-chemical realities are that we are living on top of a deep pile of substitution turtles, and the "status quo" is about trends, not levels.
I don't dispute the validity of the claims made at all, however I believe strongly that failing global transport networks and population crashes are going to swamp these effects in terms of our day to day existence, and make it far worse.
The security that allowed global transport of goods across the "free world" was a bribe offered by the United States to buy compliance from other nations for its security policies against the Soviet Union. We're backing away from those promises now that the cold war was won.
The urbanization of the world has had some long term consequences, as people move into urban areas, the have fewer children, leading to many populations not having sufficient numbers of children and younger people entering the population pyramid to support those older than themselves. China has a real problem they can't solve in this regard.
Deglobalization has begun, supply chains that rely on cheap reliable trans-national shipping are unsustainable, and need to be replaced. This compounds the effects highlighted in the original posting. It's not pessimistic enough!
Someone has been reading their Zeihan! As a counterpoint--do you think there are other export-led countries such as China that are more than willing to guarantee the transit of their goods in exchange for people continuing to buy them? I think the answer to that question is clear.
China doesn't have a blue water Navy, and there are the ring of islands around it that can limit its access to the rest of the world. They are very dependent on energy imports, and seem to be mismanaging their food supply in a way that is going to result in tragedy if they are ever subject to trade sanctions.
Like Russia, they have a credible nuclear threat, but no other means of projecting power around the world.
> China doesn't have a blue water Navy, and there are the ring of islands around it that can limit its access to the rest of the world.
IIRC, they're getting close to having a blue water navy.
Also that ring of islands may not be as impregnable as you assume: "According to a 2018 United States Department of Defense report to Congress, the People's Liberation Army's Anti Access/Area Denial military capabilities aimed at the first island chain are its most robust" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain).
> They are very dependent on energy imports, and seem to be mismanaging their food supply in a way that is going to result in tragedy if they are ever subject to trade sanctions.
Crippling trade sanctions against China are about as likely as crippling trade sanctions against the US.
> Like Russia, they have a credible nuclear threat, but no other means of projecting power around the world.
Do you think countries will have a hard time stopping privately organized pirates? Or do you fear privateers? (What country would fight against international commerce and manage to stay powerful?)
I think both pirates and privateers are possible. State sponsored warfare by other means (privateers) has deep historical roots.
I think the value of having a US or allied flagged vessel is going to radically increase in value, as it implies a possibility of retribution in force.
While you make a valid point, there is an important distinction to make clear: the US ensures global trade,
much of it contrary to US interest. If you question this consider that the US is the agent enforcing freedom of navigable waters around the world. All other partners in this effort are in subsidy.
Save your comment on embargoes! Those that are in force are pretty easily justified from a US perspective and hardly tip scales in terms of total trade. (Cuba stands as a lesson on threatening US lands with violence)
The same if controlled by China or Russia would look immensely different. No argument to the contrary holds water. Their ideas of trade and free enterprise are far more constrained.
Ha! I was going to write exactly the same thing. I've watched a few of his talks and bought one of his books the other day.
General question about Zeihan -- how substantial is his work? I think he makes compelling arguments and speaks/writes very well, but as a non-US citizen I don't really have enough historical or even present-day context to know where he sits on the hyperbole-realism scale.
The population pyramids and demographic arguments seem to be rock solid. I've watched a ton of his appearances on YouTube going back almost a decade, and he doesn't vary his story, except to accommodate facts as they became known, it's very consistent.
I'm worried about people in the rest of the world... even here in the least climate effected part of the US, I know the next decade or two are going to be rough, especially if our leadership fails to improve.
I'm fairly certain he's right on almost everything. I haven't found any huge nits to pick.
In an econ book I read once, there was a wonderful analogy: Imagine you are given a room in your house that was filled waste high with pistachios - you could go in and eat as many as you wanted, but the shells will always have to be left behind. They start out easy and plentiful to grab, and you could easily do some math about how long this room of pistachios will last you. So on paper you are sure to run out.
But in practice, you'll just spend longer going into the room every time to get what you want, and gradually stop going altogether - actually running out of nuts is pretty much impossible.
You will almost never naturally run out of stuff. Low prices make them leave it in the ground - high prices makes people find substitutes. We're just in a weird place were China might be dumping money to artificially keep some resource prices low and still extracting tons of it.
Prior to 1700 there were estimated over 350,000 blue whales in the world's oceans. Now, only an estimated 25,000 remain.
Human-caused complete extinction is very common, particularly for megafauna. E.g. giant sloths in North America and most large animals in Australia went extinct within centuries or millenia of human settlement.
Population management is a bit different. And while, yes whales are a tragedy, the paper in question is trying to make a point that running out of fixed resources will lead to economic collapse. Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain.
Also, whales in particular are an interesting example, because the vast majority of them were slaughtered completely unnecessarily by the Soviet Union just to fulfill arbitrary production quotas: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
USA took in nearly 200,000 tons of whales in 1858 alone, nearly all of it just to produce oil from the blubber, and the rest of the carcass was discarded. I'd say that was completely unnecessary as well.
> Whales are an example of a resource that collapsed with little felt economic pain.
I was reading GP's comment as not so much about whales as about the kind of thing that could happen to any flora or fauna, e.g. bees. Sooner or later we're going to deplete something that has unintended ecological and economic consequences.
It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century.
I'm not sure the potato famine is the best example, as a large part of the "famine" was due to British mismanagement/cruelty. The Brits kept exporting food from Ireland in spite of the famine, leaving the Irish to starve. Had they banned exports, like India is doing now for wheat, it likely would have been a historical footnote.
They also insisted nobody gift food to the Irish in excess of what the queen of England was giving them. Censored I think...Ottoman Empire's gifts this way. They had to maroon ships full of grain by accident, and tons of people sent food, like even Kenyans and Native Americans.
Ireland still hasn't repopulated. Still half its 19th century peak population roughly.
It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.
> you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough
That's the whole point of the analogy. Even if you still need pistachios, most rational people will start looking elsewhere.
A good example of this is California's water shortage. It may seem like collapse is inevitable, but Californians just voted against another desalination plant. Alternatives exist everywhere but the policy failure is in preventing people from exploring them.
The issue is that water is cheap and nearly free when you have enough, and nearly impossible to get when you don’t.
Desalination plants need to be run regularly or everything plugs up/corrodes. They’re also capital intensive and not cheap to operate (as the process itself is expensive per gallon), so expensive to buy and not use, AND not cheap to buy and use.
But 90% of the time, California has more water than it can use (literally!), and the remaining 10% of the time, it still isn’t actually out of water in most places, as the water sources are regional or local, and most local or regional water sources are still fine.
So you’d be spending a massive amount of money to hedge for an edge case that generally never happens in a way the hedge would economically solve. Which is why they generally don’t actually get built, or if they do, they get built and then decommissioned. At least around here.
Other, drier climates (middle east) are different of course. We’ll get there eventually I’m sure.
See the agreement this is under [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact]. Under current conditions, it’s easy for Arizona or Nevada to no longer have any allotment while California still has plenty left.
That said, now is the 10% of the time the State doesn’t have too much water.
Also note, water supplies are generally local or at most regional. The water pulled from the Colorado under the compact is pulled and transported by the Metropolitan Water District and goes to SoCal. Even if it dries up, and the aqueduct pulling water from the Central Valley and Eastern Sierra breaks - that really only impacts LA.
Which is a lot of people, and would be a crisis (ad unlikely, to put it mildly!) but a tiny portion of California by number of cities, geographic area, etc.
> Even if it dries up, and the aqueduct pulling water from the Central Valley and Eastern Sierra breaks - that really only impacts LA.
Again, you seem to be dismissive that California is about to destroy the economy of two other states in a quest for cheap water.
The CRC:
>Extreme shortage. The most severe shortage considered in the interim guidelines is when the level of Lake Mead drops below 1,025 feet (312 m), in which event 7,000,000 acre-feet (8.6 km3) per year will be delivered to the Lower Basin states: 4,400,000 acre-feet (5.4 km3) to California, 2,320,000 acre-feet (2.86 km3) to Arizona, and 280,000 acre-feet (0.35 km3) to Nevada.
90% of the water in Las Vegas comes from Lake Mead. In the event of Lake Mead drying up, the entire state of Nevada gets less than 0.5% of the volume of the Colorado. While I guess it's nice to know that SoCal has other options when the water runs out, we're talking about a humanitarian disaster for a Las Vegas that has no other options.
If desalination is really unnecessary, California should stop blocking efforts to revise the Compact.
Hardly dismissive - it’s called staying on topic? A question was asked, folks seem to not know the how or the why if the situation - so here I am.
The California diversion of the Colorado is downstream of AZ and NV. California only gets the water they let it have, under the agreement. Which California probably has more lawyers than total population in both AZ and NV state Capitals, so there is that.
California has always out ‘peopled’ and out ‘moneyed’ it’s neighbors, and LA+SF has done that within the state.
When resources were seemingly infinite and the country was growing at a breakneck pace, that was controversial but didn’t really break things.
Everything has a breaking point somewhere. We’ll see if this is one of them.
Well farmers love to put civilians at the back of the line to the well and hold them hostage. Farmers use something like...hard to measure they really really don't want measurement, but 80-90% of water. In this paper it says roughly that percentage of water is used for agriculture, it's in the charts.
Farmers get water gifts and city slickers get droughts. Basically a farmer is a water thief, surely not in 5000mm rainfall a year but in Mediterranean weather? Water thief all the way. Chinatown was about this. Just stealing water nonstop, bribes murder conspiracy you name it. It's the limiting factor in these climates and it's so so easy to steal.
Take one more drop. What's the consequence? Nothing happens. Classic tragedy of the commons.
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I don't see why a farmer should pay any less for a liter of water than anybody else. Free market for water, you pay for the quantity and the distribution raw every time. People object and insist on price discrimination to protect poor people, when really price discrimination discriminates against poor people. They end up having to buy bottled soda (blacks do this) because the water is too salty to drink, while a farmer with a square mile just pays for the power to his new wells.
Now it's true that salting the water has a huge cost and that turning water into brine to make dentists happy (or they start this crazy squealing screams about children getting cavities at rates they are purely making up) is expensive. Then stop doing it. Cold turkey. And then, don't insist everyone have perfect teeth. Feature people with bad teeth in posters, tell people to see dentists once a year at most, pull teeth now and then, look at artists like Robyn https://music.apple.com/us/artist/robyn/535211 who don't have stereotypical American dentist dream-teeth. It costs $100 a year to salt the water, then you go to your doctor she says you need to eat less sodium meaning shake the salt shaker less. What about instead colluded degreed professionals stop putting that sodium in the water table? Plus that salt in the brine--cannot be called water if it's intentionally salted--tap brine--alters brain chemistry to crave sugar, so it's not even as good at what it's supposed to do as it claims. Causes chemical imbalance, literally. F atoms effing up your sodium-chloride channels into sodium-fluoride channels. They're called sodium-chloride for historical reasons, from an era before F'ing up the water.
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Changing subjects back, price discrimination generally backfires against the poor in favor of the rich. Ever seen people digging a well in a ghetto? That's pretty much what they do in fact do, walk to the eg gas station and buy some big bottles of juice so they don't die of thirst. Ghetto water is so salty they can't even drink it (for political reasons, it's formal oppression, F'ing up the water impedes ghettoes from eg taking people to small claims courts or filing for welfare, or protesting, joining unions, complaining properly, getting an education, competing for slots in colleges, everything everything everything). The people in those ghettoes are the doing what they're doing and are doing as poorly as they're doing because they're smart and coping with poisoning. Same as the rehab I went to, 100% of patients were forced to take clozapine, and almost 100% of them rapidly fattened like fast, doubled their weight. One exception. The paranoid guy, yours truly, recognized the pharmaceutical, Abbott, from a previous round of poison (Valproic acid) with similar shoot-the-moon marketing and dodged the pill. Only skinny guy in the rehab.
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But let's not change the subject. We're talking about poison sure enough, but let us be specific.
That water tastes more like toothpaste than toothpaste itself, which is what sodium fluoride tastes like. That's sodium fluoride's signature flavor. Your body knows what that shit is, every kid hates it and struggles to avoid it, because they're smart. That's how you take mountain water and make it taste like city water, mix in some toothpaste. And in Chile which is more heavily geopolitically oppressed the fluoridation in toothpaste is insane, 250 ppm in USA, 1650 ppm in Chile. Regulation. You have to go to like a Native Chilean (Mapuche) store for non-F-ed-up toothpaste. And F-ing is the specific reason you're told not to swallow toothpaste, that's an acknowledgement that NaF is bad for you, but it's irrelevant you absorb it through your gums and mouth. Much more than with teeth, the least chemically reactive organ.
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Back to the farmer, farmer is out of luck with no water rights, nothing, oh, what? Farmers go out of business? Go, go out of business, business of theft, your subsidized thieving farm going out of business is pure benefit to the economy. Everybody wins. Just leave land as shrubland, come on. Dry, some native grasses, some bald spots, looks beautiful that way, like the land on Highway 280 South of Stanford, or around Apple Campus for that matter. Beautiful, nobody waters it, not exploited for grazing, native grasses outcompete invaders, no maintenance, leave it like that. It's not a waste. That's California. Not a golf course, that would be England. There yeah. East Coast too. Go back to England if you want to have green lawns at a price that rips everyone else off, go and don't come back, if you think the East is better than the West, go to the East from the West.
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That's one of the industries startups (including tons of YC startups, this is the right forum to bring this up) have a really hard time in, looks tempting but no, medicine and agriculture. And music, "don't do a music startup" as pg put it. No particular reason they should be so aggressive against outsiders, right? Look like good sectors? All are heavily subsidized stealing from everybody around them. No sympathy for farmers. At all. Dude just sell the land get a job selling shoes like shrinks propose rehabilitation patients do. Same goes for doctors: forget your degree, if you're a doctor you can get a job selling shoes like you propose your rehabilitation patients do. Sink or swim. No chinitas [as they're called in Chile, like the ladybug insects which do this to each other (no relation to Chinese, it's a coincidence), meaning climbing on someone else's back and drowning them to stay afloat, like both those industries currently are to everything else].
The issue you see here is first you'd need to define a price for water.
There isn't a single price. Every water district has a different one, and every water district has vastly different costs for their sources, extraction, and distribution - if for no other reason than California has wildly different climates, geological conditions, and water resources across the state.
Not to mention, under what legal theory should someone pay for water they are pumping out of the ground, under the land they own, with water rights they paid the prior owner for, using infrastructure they paid for and was installed before any of this started being a problem? And who should they even pay it to?
And should they do that even if they're in an aquifer which isn't overdrawn, and which isn't even shared with anyone else? I've got a well on some land which is in a 'pocket' aquifer. Literally 3 other people have land that accesses it. Why should anyone else have any say over how much any of us pump from it?
The state is starting to force people to do that, but it isn't an easy thing to do. You're certainly not going to convince anyone it's fair for them to pay a price per gallon for that untreated water they paid to locate and extract, over treated water at a tap in someones residence in the city.
That said, the general point of 'this is crazy bullshit, why do I have to cut back when they're sitting here wasting water on Almonds for nothing?!' is totally true. There is a LOT of bullshit about water in California.
> That said, the general point of 'this is crazy bullshit, why do I have to cut back when they're sitting here wasting water on Almonds for nothing?!' is totally true. There is a LOT of bullshit about water in California.
OK let's start with that. In fact many Californian consumers now prefer oat milk to almond milk because they know they're basically drinking 10000 gallons of pure fresh delicious non-F-ed-up water per quart of milk they drink. They hate it because it sucks. It's just shit and they hate it. Almonds are rightly and widely hated. Hatred. Good because that hatred gets rid of them, gets rid of almond desertification.
So you're basically right in everything you say, but there is a distinction to be made presently. The water table. If it were a mineral, like copper, if its under your land hey, go for it. But with water, like oil, and lithium, sucking it out of one place drains everybody else (on the same aquifer, oil field, salt flat). It's regulated with oil, not with water or lithium. So if a neighbor farmer's sucking out water sucks out not only water under his land but water under my land, that's impinging on my rights. He doesn't get to suck out the water from under my land. Any more than he gets to steal my bed from under me (Proverbs).
California specializes in evictions and water theft, though. Landlords steal from you faster than you can take them to court, they end up covering for each other, I am a Roman Law hero and I can vouch.
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And moreover, there is due to be accorded to being a citizen in California independently of being a property owner in California. Like these farmers can totally split with 1000 gallons for a "city slicker" as they call them. Monthly water bill, or a pack of almonds? Same price really.
Instead of trying to sell them one quart of almond milk. That's the endgame, dry them out, salt their water, negreate their sustenance and then sell them back some terrible shit in terrible plastic at 100000000% the price.
Extortion.
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Realistically it's because the county is loyal to the land, so whomever owns the land gets crazy benefits, blind eyes, et cetera. Obviously has to pay for them, lobbying papering over direct bribes. Obviously there's bribes, nobody with power would allow such blatant shit without a payout, it just doesn't make Historical sense. Nobody does that. I think the police doesn't take direct bribes (I took a risk on the math that there was a 2% chance SFPD was corrupt, couldn't afford that risk so didn't call them up), but small county? Knows the mayor? Invites him to his land? Phone call away from anybody? Yeah bribes. Nobody does it differently, like ever. I don't know, Californians are very square, for sure some counties are square, but really...no. There's bribes. In addition to the lobbying, that's to paper them over. The lobbying gives plausible deniability, to say the favor was done for campaign contributions. But nobody cares that fucking much about their campaign contributions if they can't touch them even diagonally. And there's career paths formally known to lead to that campaign contribution money entering the pocket, I think a Republican lobbyist talks about retiring and becoming "a top lobbyist". If it's indirect enough, like fines or taxes, that's fine, but uh...no dude there have to be bribes. I can't keep denying it in any way, I just divine it, there's crazy bribes and payers and recipients tell each other there's no way for them to be tracked.
Goes back to the water table, or voltages, there's a current flowing out, that doesn't go anywhere. Then there's an equal current flowing over here, that doesn't come from anywhere. They're next to each other. You can't look at what is in between.
Must have some hell of a capacitor in between to not be connected.
It is possible to be "right in principle but wrong in practice" about things like resource limits to growth. Particularly about the cost of extraction, and the supply chain logistics.
I think that the limits which exist here probably lie out beyond practical considerations in the known reserves, mines and processing chains.
A lot of discussion about lithium (for instance) posit "what if we converted all cars now to lithium" forgetting that to do that means replacing hundreds of millions of things, which in turn implies factories, ships, shops, tyres, lightbulbs. What actually happens is there is a logistic supply curve change from the dynamics of ICE engines to EV engines, which takes time and we argue about the slope of the line, but there IS no cliff event of 100,000,000 cars being deployed on lithium at once.
So, I really wonder at a 2021 paper which doesn't even reflect on the history of the claims.
A superb work that encapsulates the most pressing problems of the current times: the interplay between sustainability and the pressure for economic growth. Few issues are as consequential as these nowadays. Thanks for sharing.
First: The "Limits to Growth" language here is hyperbolic, and this report was commissioned by (and this PDF is hosted on the site of) a green materials/mining agency* GTK that has a "Circular Economy" project about material reuse. So this is clearly coming from a perspective of advocacy and economic interest.
Second: If you actually read the paper, they freely admit that this isn't about minerals "running out", but more that they're becoming harder to extract - especially regarding more money / energy / water.
The classic issue with this is that these models are highly sensitive to technological change, which is in turn driven by the economic realities involved. We've all seen what chips, PV panels, etc. when these all align.
To wit, note that while there is a long analysis of how current mining practice is getting harder, there is no discussion of the pace of innovation in mining tech and the trends by which it would be adopted.
An example of one tech that addresses their copper ore grade issue is biomining [1], which is using microorganisms to process the ore. This isn't widespread yet, but is in development because the industry already knows this is a problem.
The mining industry and commodities more broadly actually suffer from boom and bust cycles with respect to their CapEx invested and payback period - ie everyone frantically fracks for gas until the price goes through the floor and they all go bankrupt. So resource extraction is more about economic viability than technical constraints like the author suggests.
TL;DR: We're not in danger of long-term shortages of minerals, just shocks like we're having with oil, but these pose no danger to encountering any "limits to growth" anytime soon.
All credit to my colleagues in academia, but the pace of technological change in mining is often wildly overstated by mining companies as an attempt to attract investors, greenwash, or genuine misunderstanding of the underlying technology.
Most notably, many of the newer techs encounter meaningful difficulties as they attempt to scale. Nearly all of the advances in current mining have been either driving economies of scale (larger trucks, larger plants, block caving undergrounds) or sweating efficiencies (electronic detonators, computer-assisted monitoring and design, reprocessing tailings). One of the great things about mining is the ability to simultaneously accept there is often lots of free cash flow around to invest in the next great thing while acknowledging the brutal realities that all the tech in the world won't help if you don't have a matching orebody.
While the author does a messy job of their pitch, it's indisputable that the overall quality and size of deposits is going down over time. For many of us in the industry, we know that the problem is not going to be running out but rather is society able to handle increasingly frequent supply/demand shocks without losing the collective plot. We already see a bit of this tension now: for every bio-mining initiative we have another set of lunatics who are proposing to "mine" sea beds.
Yea, I'm not denying the quality of deposits are down, costs of processing are up, or that it's hard to make the tech work. I'm just saying that we haven't seen the dire need that would cause big changes because the industry's unique R&D and CapEx requirements to change. Dire = severally decreased production of vital end products because of mineral costs/shortages (ie the 1970's oil crisis).
Generally, there are known technologies already past the prototype stages just waiting for the prices and other factors to make them viable, and once they are they then ride the experience curve to better productivity.
Re: supply/demand shocks - Interestingly, this is where the state can have a good roll in helping smooth these out. For instance, Biden's recent bill included guaranteed oil/gas purchases that the oil industry needed so they can justify running their refineries on with uncertain future demand, with the USG taking the risk on via filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with the excess. [1]
I'm reacting to an effect that this chart [2] highlights where academia / industry is being overly conservative in their predictions. In this case, every year they predicted PV was about to run out of steam, when it was actually growing exponentially. I think this paper is doing the same thing by ignoring tech development increases in its analysis.
Are you aware of any systematic study of new mining tech development, economics, etc. that has a thorough analysis of this? This isn't my field. I'm in manufacturing, but follow the space because it's adjacent and has some things in common, so I'd be interested to get your take / sources.
I think we'd do well to look at the full implications of what you're saying:
1.) We're in agreement that energy sources need to be positive sum where you're putting in less energy than you get out. Using my point of "tech isn't the problem" here points to a ton of tech you can buy today that does this (from nukes to solar, wind, etc.), and we need gov't intervention to help fund more R&D, adoption, etc.
2.) We actually get to our carbon goals faster when we grow GDP, especially those of the developing world who can bypass old tech and techniques. Just see how much people vote for expensive climate measures when they're poor.
3.) "Wait until we're sustainable" is easy to say when you don't have to look at your family starving or in some other personal hell because you can't afford things for basic living because some high income Westerners want to tell you to pay more for them
while they live in luxury and have never known true hardship.
That's the real choice we have to make, and I'm not willing to accept a no-growth world that forces us to put those people through hell. I'd rather have a 100 years of superfund sites to clean up and 1000s of species go extinct than to make billions of people suffer through that.
> That's the real choice we have to make, and I'm not willing to accept a no-growth world
We live in a mostly closed system, except for the solar energy beamed from the sun. So hard choices will have to be made sooner or later. Taking action now should lessen the impact once the easy energy runs out.
So you can believe and accept what you like, but the laws of physics aren't negotiable. 8 billion people cannot live like most United Statians do today. Asteroid mining and planetary colonies are not going to scale enough to change that, even if we boil the oceans trying.
- Closed System: Sure, but the actual numbers are more instructive, and we're barely using any of the energy available to us via nuclear, solar, wind, etc. that exists as viable today, let alone fusion, orbital solar, etc. new tech that might come out. So yes, there are limits, but we're far from them.
- Taking Action Now: We both agree that we need to take action, but we disagree on the need to decrease growth as a solution. I think I've shown elsewhere what it's actually more probable that we win from green growth than no growth, both politically and from a resource surplus to be diverted into green tech R&D and deployment.
- Laws of Physics aren't negotiable: I agree, that's why I'm making this argument from the position of science we know and tech that exists. You have to admit though that if we're trying to be realistic, trying to stop capitalism / markets / consumption just isn't going to happen, and even if it did the lack of economic surplus would prevent the deployment of green solutions.
I think the real question here is one of aesthetics. No growthers just don't like the vibe of people consuming, trashing the environment, etc., and I can relate as a minimalist who hates all of that personally as well. The problem is when this aesthetic turns into policy ideas that feel consistent with that aesthetic, but aren't practical.
In the end, the point is moot though, as no growth isn't going to happen (thank god) and we're already developing green and post-carbon tech. I think environmentalists should take the win, they convinced the people that matter this is happening, and now even oil companies begrudging drag their feet into this green future. I'm optimistic.
I don’t see any concerns not addressed by markets. If iron becomes expensive to extract, it becomes expensive to buy, and people use it carefully. At one point unused cabins were burned down to salvage the nails.
I just don’t understand the mindset of the humble author that the rubes are too stupid to modify prices or behavior, so they will just die en masse unless some heroic NGO gets enough donations to save them.
The premise is that we don't have enough minerals to transition to a decarbonized economy if we just do the most obvious, naive thing. For some reason, he assumes we need a battery capable of storing the world's energy use for 4 weeks, and then shows that there's no way we can manufacture that amount of lithium ion batteries. His analysis also assumes pretty heavy use of hydrogen for ground transport to get around the limitations of batteries, despite being rather energy-inefficient by comparison.
I'm actually kind of optimistic: his result just means we can't do things that don't scale, but we could do other things instead. Rather than building huge chemical batteries for grid storage, we can use pumped hydro and expand our power grids so we can move energy between continents and buffer out renewable energy variability and day/night cycles. Instead of using hydrogen fuel cells or huge batteries for ground transport, we can electrify our major highways so trucks only need small batteries to get from the freeway to their delivery/pickup point. (We could also rely on trains a lot more than we do.) Instead of building billions of brand new cars, we can convert many of the cars we already have to electric if they're still in good shape and worth the effort. We can stop using so much copper in everything, and use aluminum instead where it makes sense.
There are multiple questionable assumptions but I'll focus on one early one.
"There is a current paradigm to phase out fossil fuels and all associated infrastructure. This will require an unprecedented volume of metals of all kinds. In particular, technology metals. Technology metals are the building materials needed to manufacture much of current state-of-the-art technology. Technology metals could include: Be, B, Sc, V, Ga, Ge, Se, Sr, Y, Zr, In, Te, Cs, Ba, La, Hf, Ta, Os, Tl, Li, Ru, W, Cd, Hg, Sb, Ir, Mo and Mg."
This appears to be a random selection of metals, presented without justification. Nothing about transitioning away from fossil energy requires more mercury, osmium, strontium, barium, or thallium. They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers, power electronics, or fuel cells. Did the author actually have other energy-transition-critical applications in mind or is he just trying to dazzle with quantity?
> They're not needed in wind turbines, batteries, solar cells, nuclear reactors, electric motors, electrolyzers, power electronics, or fuel cells
Except they are used in the production the semiconductors that control EVs, battery charging, etc. It's also used in the production of batteries. You're supposed to recycle your AA batteries, for instance, because of the mercuric-oxide.
Except they are used in the production the semiconductors that control EVs, battery charging, etc.
What is thallium needed for in semiconductor manufacturing? I tried searching Google Scholar and didn't turn up anything relevant. I've never seen thallium mentioned alongside semiconductor production in chemistry handbooks or chemical engineering encyclopedias either.
Global thallium production declined from 15,000 kilograms in 1994 [1] to less than 8,000 kilograms in 2018 [2] even as semiconductor production volumes increased enormously, so I am skeptical that thallium is needed for semiconductor production.
Plenty of academics fall into the category of "unbalanced". That being they're amazing at one hyper-specialization that gives them a huge ego, and then they assume they're equally amazing at everything else and end up making complete fools of themselves. I wouldn't presume anything based solely on a credential. Intelligence is not correlated with wisdom or humility.
It's possible, some might even say easy, to be both an academic and a kook, particularly so when you dive into areas that aren't your speciality and are 'political' like evolution, or climate change.
I'm sure he knows lots about mining, but he has a Fox News level of understanding about renewables.
And I think it's unfair so say he assumes mining requirs fossil fuels, he just highlights how dependant mining is on fossil fuels _now_ and for the forseeable future.
> In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
> Renewables have ERoEI ratios which are generally comparable to, or higher than, fossil fuels. Although peak oilers reach a different conclusion, that is because they are carrying out the calculation incorrectly. They are ignoring or not including massive waste heat losses (generally 60% or more) from combustion engines which drastically reduces the ERoEI of fossil fuels. Those waste heat losses provide no energy services to society, and should be counted as losses, but are wrongly counted as "energy returns" by peak oilers. Furthermore, peak oilers are ignoring or not counting other large energy losses of fossil fuels. Those omissions exaggerate the ERoEI of fossil fuels relative to renewables. When the calculation is carried out correctly, renewables have higher ERoEI ratios than fossil fuels.
The basic problem with ERoEI is that the number you get depends dramatically on how rigorous your calculation is, and applying the same amount of rigor on two different sources doesn't mean that they're off by the same amount. Fossil fuels have tons of hidden externalities, so they will usually look way better at a glance, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
It doesn't matter because it doesn't account for the relative abundance of the inputs. Read the article.
An EROI of 19 to 1 just means 5% of the total energy will be spent on extracting the energy, it doesn't tell you how much total energy there is and how fast you can extract it.
There are probably economically exploitable deposits of most of these minerals left, but the current business environment disincentivizes exploration and the political situation in many of the countries that have lots of mineral resources makes big projects hard to fund/manage.
Yes. It’s weird that moving an asteroid into orbit and taking its stuff is probably easier than being allowed to take the stuff from the ground. But here we are.
I find the asteroid mining interesting because it introduces post scarcity levels of raw materials, even rare earth elements needed for advanced applications.
Right, we cannot sustainably manage the planet upon which we evolved, so the next step is deplete what remains seeking shelter in an environment hostile to life.
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Not true. For a PV and storage based economy we need plastics, some lead and barium for perovskites, iron and aluminum for structures and machinery. Some sodium also. Some copper would be helpful for wiring. Storage can be iron-based, sodium-based, aluminum based or lithium based, as at present.
Apart from perhaps barium (for which there are many substitutes, some possibly better), none of these are rare or difficult to mine, and all are mined in large quantities.
The materials we need most of are already being mined in quantities greater than a PV-based society needs.
This paper suffers from the same problem that nearly everyone writing about this has: they assume the current situation is fixed, and we can't do anything different. Fossil fuel lobbyists have use this to argue that renewables are too expensive the whole way down their price curve. INET Oxford published a working paper with charts that nicely illustrate this "we're stopped!" fixation.[1]
The real problems we face are all political.
The physico-chemical realities are that we are living on top of a deep pile of substitution turtles, and the "status quo" is about trends, not levels.
1. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/empirically-g... Look at figure 2 on page 4.