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It is not even remotely similar to recycling by selling trash to SEA. Green energy reduces emissions on net, even including the rare earth mining. I suppose you

by darawk 4y ago

It is not even remotely similar to recycling by selling trash to SEA. Green energy reduces emissions on net, even including the rare earth mining. I suppose you could argue that the rare earth mining is also bad for some reason - but it's certainly not the case that global net carbon emissions are not being reduced by green energy.

artificial 4y ago
It seems to boil down to taxes, credits, and getting things done in places with poor controls. Everything electronic requires copper, the less pure the more it needs to be refined using massive amounts of energy provided by diesel and coal. The large trucks (400 ton behemoths) burn ~92gal/hour or 350liters/hour and run 24/7. Solar panels come from China, China uses coal and questionable labor to produce the panels. Everything is shipped across the world using oil. Minerals for the batteries and minerals for the wind turbines. Turbines use about ~5tons of copper, half of which is copper wiring. The amount of refining and how dirty it is I don't think people really grasp. The refining process is really something. Here's a neat thread on it: https://twitter.com/mining_atoms/status/1584306032653717505 https://twitter.com/mining_atoms/status/1584306032653717505
- conradev 4y ago
  It takes and is going to continue to take a massive amount of energy and resources to complete the energy transition. People are working on reducing demand for electricity through efficiency, but if we electrified everything in the US today, demand for electricity would something like 9x. So, yes, we're going to need a lot more copper.
- epistasis 4y ago
  These sorts of Twitter threads are hilarious, because they assume first of all that renewables fans are going to aghast, just aghast, when they realize that somehow there's extractive lining to produce the raw materials! Oh no! What ever will we do, guess it's time to go back to rubbing sticks together and massive degrowth! Which, sure, there are a few naive folks like that; but the renewables space is filled with industrialists that did the hard technology work of actually creating an entirely new energy future. Come on, random Twitter dude... these folks know their supply chains and are smart enough to know that basically all reports everywhere for the past 10 years are predicting this massive shift from fossil fuel extraction to mineral extraction. Nobody is surprised. As for the rest of your comment, none of the rest of the energy source has to be carbon based. And by saying that they are going to decarbonize their supply chain, Apple is creating a guaranteed customer for new business to actually deliver that supply. And for a new business, that guaranteed market is by far the most important factor for getting a new business off the ground. It means that no matter their costs, as long as they are better than the other decarbonized sources, they can win the bid. And that's where subsidies/tax credits are weaker, because they have to predict the delta between the earliest decarbonized product and the traditional alternatives. A guaranteed market gets around that. For tough-to-decarbonize sectors such as concrete, having more purchasers of the zero-carbon early products, such as city governments or state governments, is a huge boom to entrepreneurs looking to pioneer a new space. So Apple really is doing something significant, which will actually change the economy for the better, and probably more so than a tax credit scheme.

by darawk 4y ago

artificial 4y ago

It seems to boil down to taxes, credits, and getting things done in places with poor controls. Everything electronic requires copper, the less pure the more it needs to be refined using massive amounts of energy provided by diesel and coal. The large trucks (400 ton behemoths) burn ~92gal/hour or 350liters/hour and run 24/7. Solar panels come from China, China uses coal and questionable labor to produce the panels. Everything is shipped across the world using oil. Minerals for the batteries and minerals for the wind turbines. Turbines use about ~5tons of copper, half of which is copper wiring. The amount of refining and how dirty it is I don't think people really grasp. The refining process is really something. Here's a neat thread on it: https://twitter.com/mining_atoms/status/1584306032653717505 https://twitter.com/mining_atoms/status/1584306032653717505

conradev 4y ago
It takes and is going to continue to take a massive amount of energy and resources to complete the energy transition. People are working on reducing demand for electricity through efficiency, but if we electrified everything in the US today, demand for electricity would something like 9x. So, yes, we're going to need a lot more copper.
epistasis 4y ago
These sorts of Twitter threads are hilarious, because they assume first of all that renewables fans are going to aghast, just aghast, when they realize that somehow there's extractive lining to produce the raw materials! Oh no! What ever will we do, guess it's time to go back to rubbing sticks together and massive degrowth! Which, sure, there are a few naive folks like that; but the renewables space is filled with industrialists that did the hard technology work of actually creating an entirely new energy future. Come on, random Twitter dude... these folks know their supply chains and are smart enough to know that basically all reports everywhere for the past 10 years are predicting this massive shift from fossil fuel extraction to mineral extraction. Nobody is surprised. As for the rest of your comment, none of the rest of the energy source has to be carbon based. And by saying that they are going to decarbonize their supply chain, Apple is creating a guaranteed customer for new business to actually deliver that supply. And for a new business, that guaranteed market is by far the most important factor for getting a new business off the ground. It means that no matter their costs, as long as they are better than the other decarbonized sources, they can win the bid. And that's where subsidies/tax credits are weaker, because they have to predict the delta between the earliest decarbonized product and the traditional alternatives. A guaranteed market gets around that. For tough-to-decarbonize sectors such as concrete, having more purchasers of the zero-carbon early products, such as city governments or state governments, is a huge boom to entrepreneurs looking to pioneer a new space. So Apple really is doing something significant, which will actually change the economy for the better, and probably more so than a tax credit scheme.