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The article directly addressed this point & why it is a wash, at best. New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar

by 40four 7y ago

The article directly addressed this point & why it is a wash, at best. New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar. Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure. Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat climate change as much as the next guy, but this article is saying what we need to hear. The situation is dire & it might be too late to avoid the worst. Man, I hope not. I'm very hopeful. But I often get worried, & pessimistic like the author. If you really look at it objectively, everything is still trending in the wrong direction. Even at the rate renewable energy is coming online. Electricity is only part of the problem. Only 20% according to this guys numbers. And it's still predominantly created by coal. What about all the gasoline/ diesel for cars? Oil heating homes & buildings? There's too many people. Crap it's hard to not be pessimistic :(

AstralStorm 7y ago
It's fixable by concentrated arcologies, central heating and further electric plus hub and spoke transit and transport systems. But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either. Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the rare earths and batteries are the hard part.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  By the way, a major problem that cannot be fixed is transport of basic resources for processing and manufacturing. Localization makes no sense as you have to transport the raw resources to where they're needed anyway and it is almost impossible that you have the necessary materials or parts on hand. Concentration works better as you can use bulk transport, cheaper per unit. But reducing consumption and replacing materials with locally available equivalents is king. In this regard, most plastics can be made locally (or the equivalents) so local assembly would win, but for advanced technologies or metal products there's no way most of the time to replace it. We can use less - plastic cars, earthworks and plastics (esp. biopolymers) rather than glass and concrete for structure as much as possible and more.

by 40four 7y ago

AstralStorm 7y ago

It's fixable by concentrated arcologies, central heating and further electric plus hub and spoke transit and transport systems. But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either. Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the rare earths and batteries are the hard part.

AstralStorm 7y ago
By the way, a major problem that cannot be fixed is transport of basic resources for processing and manufacturing. Localization makes no sense as you have to transport the raw resources to where they're needed anyway and it is almost impossible that you have the necessary materials or parts on hand. Concentration works better as you can use bulk transport, cheaper per unit. But reducing consumption and replacing materials with locally available equivalents is king. In this regard, most plastics can be made locally (or the equivalents) so local assembly would win, but for advanced technologies or metal products there's no way most of the time to replace it. We can use less - plastic cars, earthworks and plastics (esp. biopolymers) rather than glass and concrete for structure as much as possible and more.