There is still a widespread belief that it is possible to transition away from fossil fuels, a myth which is contradicted by an ever growing body of evidence. Not that the previous model — based on coal, oil and gas — was even a slight bit more sustainable: we are talking about finite resources after all. However, the “energy transition” was a far more easier sell, than admitting that we have reached the end of growth, and that a long winding road back to a much simpler life is what awaits. Meanwhile, the real crisis (climate change), has proved to be a far more complex topic than what could be “tackled” by turning a few coal fired power plants off, and wishing for the magic unicorn of the Hydrogen economy to materialize… Where did it all go wrong? What kind of transition is possible then?
Let’s start by making a simple statement first: There has been no energy transition ever taking place in human history. Neither in the 19th century, when coal came into the picture, nor in the 20th with the advent of nuclear, or in the 21st, for that matter, with the widespread adoption of wind and solar. As the term implies, it would’ve required us to abandon a viable energy source in favour of another, ramping down the old one in advantage of the new. That would’ve meant leaving vast reserves of the old energy source out there, untapped. That has never happened, and never will, for a simple reason: the Maximum Power Principle.
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Visualizing The Copper Investment Opportunity In One Chart
Copper is essential for clean energy applications such as solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles (EVs), as well as for expanding electrical grids.
The surge in demand for the metal, driven by the growing adoption of these technologies, presents a unique investment opportunity for early investors in copper mining companies.
Copper is naturally abundant on Earth, but extracting the metal at the pace necessary for an electrified economy could be a challenge. The timeline for bringing a copper mine from discovery to production is lengthy, averaging over 16 years.
Top producers like Chile and Peru are facing strikes and protests, along with declining ore grades. Russia, ranked seventh in copper production, faces an expected decline in production due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the increasing adoption of carbon-free technology only highlights copper’s significance.
High Demand for Transport and Electricity Grid
The demand for copper in the transport sector is projected to increase by 11.1 times by 2050, from 2022. EVs, for example, can contain more than a mile of copper wiring.
Additionally, the demand for copper needed to expand the global electricity grid is projected to increase by 4.8 times by 2050, from 2022.
By 2030, the copper supply gap is projected to approach 10 million metric tons, with both copper prices and copper mining stocks potentially set to benefit.
As the world embraces clean technologies, the search for and expansion of copper mines will be essential. Early investors who gain exposure to copper miners may benefit from the rapidly increasing demand.
Sprott offers convenient exchange-traded alternatives for investors seeking exposure to copper miners.
The energy transition is essential but complex and challenging.
The pace of the transition and the balance between future and current energy security are key issues.
Economic and logistical barriers, as well as geopolitical and environmental concerns, need to be addressed for a successful transition.
The future of the global energy sector is caught up in a messy and misleading ideological debate. Depending on which politically informed echo chamber one inevitably finds themself confined to on social media, they are either told that the energy transition is a dangerous myth that will end in economic disaster and permanent rolling blackouts, or that clean energy is going to save the world overnight – as soon as conservatives get out of the way. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between.
The energy transition is strictly necessary. But it’s going to be very, very hard. It’s damaging to deny that there will almost certainly be shocks, missteps, and setbacks as we undergo one of the most disruptive chapters in industrial history. In large part we’re relying on untested and in many cases as-yet unproven technologies to emerge in the nick of time.
There’s a temptation to sugar-coat the scale of the imperative to make the energy transition more palatable and less daunting. But there’s no denying it – it’s a very uncomfortable, and even frightening, petition to be in. And there will be winners and losers as economic priorities shift – the energy transition is good for humanity as a whole, but it certainly isn’t good for everyone. Acknowledging these difficult truths is essential to properly planning for and managing humanity’s greatest cooperative project.
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This contemplation shares a response of mine to another within an ongoing discussion regarding a Facebook post by Clean Energy Canada[1] highlighting one of Canada’s major energy companies’ offshore wind farm projects. This ‘think tank’ out of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada works “…to accelerate Canada’s clean energy transition by sharing the story of the global shift to renewable energy, clean technology, and sustainable industries…”[2]
The energy dilemma our species has found itself immersed in is much, much more complex than just fossil fuels versus non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHT) — aka ‘renewables’ — and about energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI). Mind you, the numbers you provide for various EROEI seem rather generous towards renewables and not in line with numbers I have seen[3]; of course, there is much disagreement amongst analysts about not only the numbers pertaining to EROEI but how to best evaluate them. And while EROEI is an important concept and analytical tool for evaluating the potential benefit:cost ratio of fuels, focusing solely upon it and related measurements/analyses often if not always leads to a neglect of the very real ecological consequences of human energy use and the significant extractive and industrial processes associated with it.
And this plight we find ourselves in as we explore (and disagree about) alternatives to fossil fuels is certainly much more complicated than just the focus upon the atmospheric loading due to carbon emissions that most concentrate upon.
Research suggests biodiversity loss, land-system change, and biogeochemical flows are three planetary limits we have more drastically surpassed compared to atmospheric pollution-loading and subsequent changes to climate[4]. These aspects of our ever-increasing impact upon the planet are invariably overshadowed by the clarion calls to reduce carbon emissions and transition to low- or no-carbon technologies.
‘Renewables’ may be marginally better in certain aspects, but they are also less better in others; for example, the energy density of certain fossil fuels is far, far better than solar/wind that must be stored in batteries[5]. They also require storage technologies (and thus materials) whose production wreak havoc upon our ecological systems[6]. This observation should in no way be construed as support for fossil fuels.
Regardless of these observations, my initial and subsequent assertions were to focus attention upon misuse of the term ‘clean energy’.
The terms ‘green’, ‘clean’, and ‘sustainable’ when referring to the products of the energy complex are bold-faced lies and this is what I was pointing out. These are marketing/propaganda terms meant, when it gets right down to it, to sell stuff. But also to advance an idea — an idea that allows people to continue consuming and also feel good about such consumption while simultaneously dispensing with the notion that consumption and the associated penchant to chase the infinite growth chalice is bad for the planet — an increasing concern over the past few decades but increasingly denied/ignored by many because it can all be done with ‘green’ growth via ‘clean’ technologies (oxymorons if ever there were ones).
The ecological damage that we continue to perpetrate upon the planet in our attempts to sustain our complex energy-intensive conveniences (that we have come to depend upon as we’ve lost the skills/knowledge to be locally self-sufficient) via non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies is for the most part completely and utterly left out of the propaganda/marketing we are exposed to; or, rationalised away by the fanciful narratives weaved about ‘clean’ technologies.
These comforting narratives, much like everything else, are leveraged by the ruling caste and profiteers (and there is much overlap between these two groups) to meet their primary motivation: control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus power and wealth. And the narrative control managers that work with and on behalf of these groups know full well that significant psychological mechanisms (e.g., reduction of cognitive dissonance, obedience/deference to authority, groupthink, etc.) can be activated to support such stories.
Some have argued that the industrial processes necessary for these technologies (especially the battery components for storage, the scale necessary to replace fossil fuel power, and the massive electrical infrastructure required) is as bad as that created by our use of fossil fuels — to say little about the observation that we lack the finite resources to do this[7].
While we continue to argue over ‘solutions’ for addressing climate change (i.e., fossil fuels vs renewables in order to reduce carbon emissions), we fail to recognise that this particular conundrum is just one of the symptoms of ecological overshoot.
So rather than addressing our fundamental predicament we seek to attempt to solve one of its many consequences, and in a way that exacerbates overshoot. We ignore the ongoing and massive ecological systems destruction and compound it via marginal improvements in technology not realising that it is our technology that has placed us in overshoot.
We weave stories to tell each other that no sacrifices are necessary (especially within so-called ‘advanced’ economies) and that we have the ingenuity to ‘solve’ anything thrown our way.
And rather than confronting our predicament, admitting the scale of its impending consequences for our (and likely every other) species, and getting down to discuss the really hard choices we need to be making, we continue to not only rationalise away the anxiety-provoking thoughts such an approach would lead to but ‘allow’ the worst of us to ‘control’ our collective future.
[1] It is clear that the algorithms that track my social media interactions recognise my interest in energy issues and periodically place in my Facebook feed these type of posts.
[2] While I have neither the time nor inclination to attempt a ‘forensic audit’ of the funding of this ‘think tank’, it seems self-evident that it’s part of a growing ‘industry’ to market ‘clean’ energy products via the notion that these are ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ (even if they’re not) and receives substantial financial support from the ‘clean energy’ industry.
Roadblocks To Our ‘Renewable’ Energy Transition: Debt, Resource Constraints, and Diminishing Returns
Today’s contemplation is a quick rundown of three of the roadblocks I see preventing us from achieving the utopian dream of a seamless ‘clean’ energy transition from dirty fossil fuels, or at least one as marketed by the ruling caste and leveraged by many (most?) businesses to sell their products/services (and virtue-signal their ‘progressive’ nature).
These few items have been percolating in my mind this past week or so with a number of articles I’ve perused during my morning coffee. If readers can add to these in the comments (with appropriate supportive links), I will begin to create a more comprehensive list to share periodically down the road…
Here, in no particular order, are three of the issues I’ve been pondering:
For all intents and purposes, and by most observable accounts, our financial/monetary/economic systems are Ponzi-type systems requiring constant expansion/growth to keep from collapsing[2]. Many lay the beginnings of this treacherous trend upon Richard Nixon’s abrogation of the Bretton Woods Agreement that hammered the final nail in the coffin of a precious metals-based monetary system[3]. Others point to the introduction of fiat money/currencies as the initiation point, when the ‘constraint’ of physical commodities was removed from money and government/ruling elite solidified their monopoly of its creation/distribution. If one looks back even before modern fiat currencies, however, there is much written about how the Roman ruling elite were engaged in such manipulation of their money[4].
The Ponzi nature of these systems requires that perpetual growth be pursued. That such a pursuit is impossible on a finite planet should be self-evident but as I have highlighted previously we walking, talking apes are story tellers whose imaginations are creative at weaving tales to reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts — such as our ingenuity and technological prowess allows us to ignore/deny/rationalise away physical laws and biological principles and pursue infinite growth despite any bio- and geo-physical limitations.
That we have created and depend significantly upon such increasingly complex and fragile systems should give us pause, but this is rare and typically frowned upon. There seems only three basic means of dealing with such a situation: 1) inflate away the problem[5]; 2) debt jubilees[6]; 3) growth[7]. All of these approaches seem to have been used individually or in combination in history, and yet the endgame tends to be the same every time certain tipping points are reached: rejection of the monetary system of the time.
There’s been a boatload of analyses on what such a repudiation of a society’s currency system means to a people and their society[8]. While a currency ‘collapse’ does not necessarily lead to societal ‘collapse’, it does appear to throw economic systems into chaos for some time and destroy much in the way of societal ‘wealth’ and thus investment capital; and contributes to the eventual fall of a society — especially if there’s no lender-of-last-resort to ride to the rescue.
Such a situation would seem to negate the possibility of achieving the dream of transitioning to some ‘clean/green’ energy-based society given the magnitude of the debt that is currently present, the ‘wealth’ this represents, and the huge investments that would be necessary for a shift from our primary source of energy (fossil fuels).
Perhaps the most significant impediment going forward from a currency collapse would be the general lack of trust in government and financial institutions. And it is ‘trust/confidence’ that keeps these fragile systems from being totally abandoned; when it is lost, there’s no telling how quickly more widespread ‘collapse’ may occur. As archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues, it is when the economic benefits of participating in a complex society fall below the costs incurred that a populace begins to abandon its support of the various systems and ‘collapse’ can soon follow[9].
Mineral/resource constraints
That we exist upon a finite planet should also give pause to those cheerleading a ‘renewable’ energy transition in that geophysical realities limit what we can physically accomplish in terms of resource extraction and use.
Simon Michaux, Associate Professor Mineral Processing and Geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland, has for some time been highlighting the impossibility of replacing our fossil fuel-based systems with non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHT)[10].
The main hyped-up narrative surrounding the utopian future we are constantly promised by our societal leadership (both political and corporate) is that of a clean-energy future that not only sustains our present-day energetic conveniences, but allows continual expansion, technological progress, and prosperity. Dr. Michaux asserts that this is a pipe-dream because there do not exist the needed minerals to carry out such a transition from fossil fuels. Not even enough to replace and thus sustain the current level of energetic needs, let alone continuing to pursue growth.
Advocates dismiss this inconvenient reality — to say little about the environmental/ecological system damage that would result from the mining and processing of all the minerals and products required — by suggesting this can be overcome by reducing our energetic consumption/needs to a far lower level such that the finite materials can meet our needs, or developing many as-yet-to-be-hatched energy-production chickens. They also raise the arguments that recycling will guarantee perpetual resource requirements failing to understand that this is a very energy-intensive process and not as effective in reducing energy-use and pollutants as marketed[11] and are even being abandoned in many regions due to increasing costs[12].
Diminishing Returns
The human tendency in addressing resource requirements (in fact, to solve most problems) is to utilise the easiest-to-access and cheapest-to-extract ones first, leaving the more expensive and difficult ones to a later time. This, of course, means we must invest greater and greater amounts of labour/energy into extraction and processing as time passes, even to simply maintain current levels. In economic parlance, this reality has become referred to as the law of diminishing returns/productivity.
In energy circles, this tendency has been used to develop the concept of energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI)[13]. Basically, this is the ‘net’ energy that one derives from energy production. The greater the EROEI, the greater the amount of energy that can be used for purposes other than accessing/extracting/producing the energy in the first place. But as EROEI falls, there is less and less energy available for non-energy extraction/production systems.
We have witnessed a significant and precipitous drop in EROEI for fossil fuels[14], and the EROEI for NRREHTs is quite a bit lower than the legacy oil/gas fields that our globalised industrial world has used to grow to its present complexity; in fact, some argue that the EROEI of NRREHT is so low as to be incapable of supporting today’s globalised civilisation at anywhere near the current level of complexities[15].
A Few Other Hurdles to Our ‘Renewable-Energy’ Utopia
Here are a few additional issues that would seem to make the dream of a ‘clean’ energy future anything but doable, especially to the degree some (many? most?) imagine.
1. Current advanced-economy lifestyles require more energy than can be provided by ‘renewables’[16].
2. ‘Renewables’ require significant fossil fuel inputs[17].
3. Significant industrial processes cannot be carried out via ‘renewable’ energies[18].
4. And, perhaps most importantly, both the upstream and downstream industrial processes necessary to create, maintain, and reclaim/dispose of ‘renewables’ wreak havoc on our environment and ecological systems[19].
I could write much more on each of these roadblocks to the idea of our complex global society transitioning to NNREHT. Whether one accepts these as insurmountable or not depends very much on one’s interpretation of the data/evidence — and probably to a greater extent on one’s hopes/wishes (i.e., personal biases).
Keeping at the forefront of one’s thinking the fact that the future is unknowable, unpredictable, and full of unknown unknowns, anything is possible. But I would argue we do ourselves no favours in participating in and believing without full skepticism our various narratives about endless growth and technological ingenuity as the saviours that will make our utopian dreams/wishes of a ‘clean/green’ future come true.
Such magical thinking keeps us on a trajectory that increasingly is looking to be suicidal in nature, or, at the most promising, deeply ‘disappointing’ and broadly chaotic/catastrophic.
Time, of course, will tell…
And please note, as I have had to emphasise with others whom I’ve disagreed with regarding this ‘clean’ energy transition and NRREHTs: “… it is not that I ‘hate’ renewables or am a shill for the fossil fuel industry (the two typical accusations lobbed at me); I simply recognise their limitations, negative impacts, and that they are no panacea.”
[18] See this. It’s imperative to note here that all rationalisations of ‘clean’ industrial processes rely upon as-yet-to-be-hatched chickens such as Carbon Capture and Storage or untenable energy production such as that based upon the use of hydrogen.
The CEO of TotalEnergies believes that the renewable transition will lead to higher—not lower—energy prices. That’s a very different view from the popular belief that renewable energy prices are falling so fast that electric power will become ever-cheaper.
“We think that fundamentally this energy transition will mean a higher price of energy.
“I know that there is a theory which says renewables are cheaper, so it will be a lower price. We don’t think so because a system where you [have] more renewable intermittency is less efficient . . . so we think it’s an interesting field to invest in.
La Camera’s statement is based on a 2021 report by IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency) that evaluated the levelized costs for renewable energy sources. The problem is that IRENA’s study only evaluated generation costs and did not account for electric power backup and storage costs. Since wind and solar are intermittent sources of electricity, the cost of natural gas backup or battery storage must be included in their levelized cost.
Lazard published a report in 2023 that includes backup and storage costs. The data indicates that electric power costs from wind and solar are about 21% more than from combined-cycle natural gas and 44% more than from coal (Figure 1). At first glance, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable premium to pay for cleaner electric power.
Figure 1. The levelized cost for electric power from wind and solar with backup is 21% more than from combined-cycle natural gas and 44% more than from coal. Source: Lazard & Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
The entire narrative around ‘electrifying’ everything is primarily about the marketing of ecologically-destructive and completely unsustainable industrial products while leveraging human emotions about well-meaning care and compassion for the world and fellow species.
I believe the reasoning is simple: those who own the industries and financial institutions that are required for such a transition stand to profit handsomely from the belief that we can have our cake and eat it too, so let’s pour all remaining capital into ‘transitioning’ to something ‘green/clean’.
Only this is a fantasy.
The denial of reality required to believe in this tale not only serves to reduce the anxiety from the cognitive dissonance created when we realise that we live on a finite planet that has blown past the natural carrying capacity for humans and have hit significant diminishing returns on the most important resources to support our various complexities, but also leads to significant magical thinking about our ability to ‘transition’ from fossil fuels (that underpin virtually everything in our complex societies, especially food production, transportation, and adequate shelter) to something equally effective but non-destructive and sustainable.
There is nothing ‘resilient’ about this narrative. Humanity (at least in the form of complex, industrial societies) is not going to ‘recover quickly’ from the energy cliff we have likely already begun our descent from. It seems a misguided and misinformed story that serves to dish out ‘hope’ as opposed to the harsh ‘reality’ that we are in significant ecological overshoot and the primary resource that has led us here (fossil fuels) is in terminal decline with no substitute available[1].
We seem to be flailing about telling ourselves and others comforting tales while deferring to our ruling elite who are hell bent on leveraging our various crises to their economic and political advantage.
It’s past time we stop looking for magical solutions and face the looming hardships that are before us.
Let’s divert our remaining energy and resources towards safely decommissioning those dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants and their waste products, biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens, and chemical production and storage facilities) and relocalising as much as is possible the procurement of potable water, food production, and regional shelter needs.
Telling ourselves and believing in lies and fairy tales is a sure recipe for the consequences of our well-meaning but ecologically-destructive ways to be significantly worse than they could otherwise be. Ramping up our industrial production of unsustainable technologies not only expedites the negative consequences of our overshoot but worsens our plight by further reducing the planet’s carrying capacity.
[1] This avoids the even more difficult discussion that even if we were to stumble upon a ‘green/clean’ energy substitute for fossil fuels, there are a host of other significant impediments to sustaining an 7+ billion population on a finite planet.
Green energy, it turns out, is something of a myth. And, given all that’s at stake, a rather dangerous myth. Welcome to this Off The Cuff podcast with Professor Simon Michaux
There is no topic more important than today’s. Everything hinges on “us” getting it right. And by us I mean the entire global population.
That topic is energy. Specifically, the energy transition away from fossil fuels generally but oil most urgently. Why? Because oil is central to everything about our current way of life. The capital markets only function while expanding, literally millions of distinct products find the headwaters of their genesis in building blocks derived from oil. 95% of everything moves from point A to point B moves because of oil.
Heck, you eat oil in the form of oil-extracted or produced fertilizers, tractor activity, pesticides, and herbicides, and the fact that the average calorie you eat first traveled 1,500 miles before landing on your plate, every mile of that enabled by oil.
If we get this transition wrong – either by failing to plan appropriately or, worse, fibbing to ourselves by selling a set of technologies that cannot do what we’ll need them to do – then massive pain awaits. Economies will crash, as will populations. Wars will be fought.
Today we’re talking with Simon Michaux, an associate professor of geo-metallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland and a key figure in the Circular Economy Solutions Unit. Dr. Michaux has done the math. He’s taken the time to study mining and resources and then performs some simple arithmetic to determine that…uh oh…we haven’t got a chance in the world of making an easy energy transition. None. The reasons are many, but the core of the problem is we’ve put the wrong people in charge and allowed flawed narratives to take flight unchallenged.
The green techno-dream is so vastly destructive, they say, ‘we have to come up with a different plan.’
Cobalt mining in Congo, says journalist Siddharth Kara, ‘drags humanity back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only their replacement cost.’ Photo via Harvard Kennedy School.
“Sometime during this century, it is highly likely that worldwide depletion of natural resources will force an entire reorganization of social and economic structures, perhaps violently.” — Walter Youngquist, ‘Our Plundered Planet’
We are going to have to dramatically downsize the dream of a future in which we replace 150-year-old fossil fuel infrastructure with “clean energy” by 2050.
That’s the message in a number of recent important reports and books. They underscore a number of problems with the renewables illusion, including the complexity of the task, the toxicity of rare earth mining and the scarcity of critical minerals.
These grounded realists, including the French journalist Guillaume Pitron and the Australian geologist Simon Michaux, all have three basic messages:
There are dramatic limits to growth.
Truth and reality are not linear.
And the world needs a better plan to avoid collapse other than replacing one unsustainable fossil fuel system with another intensive mining system powered by even more extreme energies. In other words, electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path.
‘Doubling down on the wrong thing’
For largely ideological reasons many greens and “transitionists” have presented the transition to renewables as a smooth road with no potholes.
The “energy transition” continues to receive thunderous applause from all the usual Beltway suspects, an exercise in groupthink fantasy amazing to behold. For those with actual lives to live and thus uninterested in silliness: The “energy transition” is a massive shift, wholly artificial and politicized, from conventional energy inexpensive (Table 1b and here), reliable, and very clean given the proper policy environment, toward such unconventional energy technologies as wind and solar power. They are expensive, unreliable, and deeply problematic environmentally in terms of toxic metal pollution, wildlife destruction, land use massive and unsightly, emissions of conventional pollutants, and in a larger context large and inexorable reductions in aggregate wealth and thus the social willingness to invest in environmental protection.
But the Beltway being what it is, the fantasists are impervious to reality, until the massive costs and dislocations and absurdities become impossible to ignore. (Witness, for example, California.) Even as they backtrack on their confident assertions that a modern economy can be powered with the energy equivalent of pixie dust, they argue that the emerging problems are little more than growing pains attendant upon short run rigidities, and all will be well given some more time, more subsidies, and more magical thinking.
Uh, no. The obstacles confronting the “energy transition” are fundamental — they are caused by the very nature of unconventional energy — driven by massive costs, technical and engineering realities, severe constraints in terms of needed physical inputs, and at a political level growing local opposition to the unconventional energy facilities central to the “transition.”
These realities — there’s that word again — are discussed in detail in a major recent paper by Mark P. Mills of the Manhattan Institute. This brief discussion cannot do it justice, but let us first quote Mills directly:
In 2022, I authored two articles expressing doubts about society’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable solar and wind power. In this final article in the series, I’ll explain why my conclusions are based on experience as well as analysis.
My gloomy assessment of the prospects for renewable energy is not motivated by love of fossil fuels. In fact, I’ve spent the past two decades writing books and articles and giving hundreds of talks arguing that our collective adoption of coal, oil, and gas was the biggest mistake in human history. However, I don’t think, as some spokespeople for environmental organizations sometimes seem to do, that any criticism of alternative energy sources is a form of climate denialism.
At the other extreme, I disagree with the few hard-core environmentalists who believe that renewables are a complete dead end. After humanity’s fossil-fueled fever has eventually broken, we will return to renewable energy, one way or another. We’ve relied on renewable energy for untold millennia in terms of food, firewood, wind, and flowing water. It certainly would be preferable if we could partially transition to forms of renewable energy that would enable us to maintain some of the best of what we’ve accomplished over the past few energy-intensive decades—including scientific knowledge and creative works produced in a growing host of media, from sound recording to motion pictures to digital art. Unfortunately, that will be impossible without functioning electricity grids, which are challenging to maintain even in the best of times. If we could use hydro, solar, wind, and geothermal energy to power slimmed-down grids, that would greatly ease the transition away from fossil fuels.
In short, I have no reason to dislike renewable energy. In fact, I love it. And I live with it.
Suppose that Scotland’s CO2 emissions fell tomorrow to zero, i.e., that, at midnight, the country ceased to exist. Then according to the “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change” (MAGICC), based on the latest IPCC climate models, the reduction in the Earth’s temperature in 2100 would be…undetectable.
Motivated by the moral necessity and urgency of this goal, the Scottish Government is proposing a novel energy policy – its “Energy Strategy and Just Transition Plan”.
This article reviews its major themes and their implications, and considers briefly the probability of success of the Scottish Government implementing it.
In 2022, due to an insufficient quantity of wind and sun, Scotland’s current collection of wind and solar energy-scavenging devices failed to generate about 70% of their nameplate capacity. Recent exhaustive statistical and econometric analysis of wind generation in Scotland by Edinburgh University shows that it is uneconomic and destined for taxpayer bailout. Under the Scottish Government’s novel energy strategy, wind and solar energy-scavenging devices are to be greatly expanded.
Hydrogen, an energy carrier that squanders in waste-heat a gigawatt of power generation for every gigawatt it carries, is elevated in the Scottish Government’s understanding of energy to the category of a fuel, and also greatly expanded.
Hydrocarbon and nuclear – actual fuels – provide the energy to manufacture and endlessly replace wind turbines and solar panels. They also, in Scotland, provide the power sources that run under all conditions to ensure continuity of energy supply during Scotland’s frequent sunless and windless conditions. These are to be discontinued.
Like all advanced economies, Scotland cannot tolerate even a small measure of power supply fluctuation. Without firm dispatchable thermal standby generation capacity to smooth supply fluctuation, the eventual daily around 40GW amplitude power fluctuation resulting from the proposed expansion of weather-dependent electrical generation must be adapted for use in some other way…
(Bloomberg) — Glencore Plc added its voice to a chorus of miners warning of coming copper shortages, arguing that a “huge deficit” is looming for the crucial industrial metal.
Chief Executive Officer Gary Nagle said that while some people were assuming that the industry would lift supplies as it had in previous cycles to meet a forecast increase in demand driven by the energy transition, “this time it is going to be a bit different.”
He presented estimates showing a cumulative gap between projected demand and supply of 50 million tons between 2022 and 2030. That compares with current world copper demand of about 25 million tons a year.
“There’s a huge deficit coming in copper, and as much as people write about it, the price is not yet reflecting it,” Nagle said.
Copper miners and analysts have been warning of growing deficits starting in the mid-2020s, driven by rising demand for copper in wind and solar farms, high voltage cables, and electric vehicles. While most analysts believe that prices will rise from current levels around $8,500 a ton, there is some disagreement about how large the copper shortages might be.
Still, Nagle said that Glencore, which is one of the world’s top copper miners and traders, will wait to lift its own output of the metal until the world is “screaming” for it. “We want to see that deficit,” he said.
Nagle said that Glencore could lift its annual copper production by more than 60% from current levels of 1 million tons with expansions of its current assets. The company is also eyeing a $5.6 billion new-build project at El Pachon in Argentina.
Not sustainable: Vast quantities of minerals and metals are required for the renewable energy transition. (Photo credit: AleSpa/Wikimedia Commons)
Renewable energy isn’t replacing fossil fuel energy—it’s adding to it.
Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.
The notion of voluntarily reining in economic growth in order to minimize climate change and make it easier to replace fossil fuels is political anathema not just in the rich countries, whose people have gotten used to consuming at extraordinarily high rates, but even more so in poorer countries, which have been promised the opportunity to “develop.”
After all, it is the rich countries that have been responsible for the great majority of past emissions (which are driving climate change presently); indeed, these countries got rich largely by the industrial activity of which carbon emissions were a byproduct. Now it is the world’s poorest nations that are experiencing the brunt of the impacts of climate change caused by the world’s richest. It’s neither sustainable nor just to perpetuate the exploitation of land, resources, and labor in the less industrialized countries, as well as historically exploited communities in the rich countries, to maintain both the lifestyles and expectations of further growth of the wealthy minority.
From the perspective of people in less-industrialized nations, it’s natural to want to consume more, which only seems fair…
