Mark Z Jacobson from Stanford has been working on the numbers for many years, and says he's calculated ways for every country to go completely carbon neutral on energy very quickly
Mark Z Jacobson from Stanford has been working on the numbers for many years, and says he's calculated ways for every country to go completely carbon neutral on energy very quickly
reckon that it's just not possible nor feasible to obtain the amounts of rare and precious earth materials needed for a "sustainable renewable" transition to a pure electricity-based economy.
They're doubtless correct, and sure-as-neggs know more about the numbers of the situation than me; I just find it to be a startlingly curious correlation that both "used to" work for extractives industries, and, both appear to use their certitude over the *current* state of tech as some sort of rationale for essentially doing nothing at all in response to our predicament.
- To be clear:
the cynical phrase we hear touted so often is about "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic"; but that whole line of thinking seems over-engineered to short circuit the idea that it's never too late to finally do the right thing -- in this case to set up energy structures the way they ought to have been decades ago, approximately when Jimmy Carter had solar panels on the West Wing roof, before the pre-Atlas Network backed neo-liberal political takeover started with Regan saw them taken down again) -- and the status quo of trillions in subsidies to fossil fuel industries if redirected to sustainable renewables since Jimmy Carter's days would surely have made a massive difference in the current state of rapidly deteriorating climate breakdown we now see daily... and monthly
- T W E L V E months in a row of record smashing global temperature rises -
but hey, sure, let's not even try to finally get it right; let's not even bother to attempt to leave better structures for any future possible survivors; let's just continue on as if there's no point to any effort at change, right, Art and Simon?
Mark Z Jacobson from Stanford has been working on the numbers for many years, and says he's calculated ways for every country to go completely carbon neutral on energy very quickly
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/
... whereas Simon Michaux
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/the-unsustainable-green-transition
and Art Berman
https://www.planetcritical.com/p/energy-wars-art-berman
reckon that it's just not possible nor feasible to obtain the amounts of rare and precious earth materials needed for a "sustainable renewable" transition to a pure electricity-based economy.
They're doubtless correct, and sure-as-neggs know more about the numbers of the situation than me; I just find it to be a startlingly curious correlation that both "used to" work for extractives industries, and, both appear to use their certitude over the *current* state of tech as some sort of rationale for essentially doing nothing at all in response to our predicament.
- To be clear:
the cynical phrase we hear touted so often is about "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic"; but that whole line of thinking seems over-engineered to short circuit the idea that it's never too late to finally do the right thing -- in this case to set up energy structures the way they ought to have been decades ago, approximately when Jimmy Carter had solar panels on the West Wing roof, before the pre-Atlas Network backed neo-liberal political takeover started with Regan saw them taken down again) -- and the status quo of trillions in subsidies to fossil fuel industries if redirected to sustainable renewables since Jimmy Carter's days would surely have made a massive difference in the current state of rapidly deteriorating climate breakdown we now see daily... and monthly
- T W E L V E months in a row of record smashing global temperature rises -
but hey, sure, let's not even try to finally get it right; let's not even bother to attempt to leave better structures for any future possible survivors; let's just continue on as if there's no point to any effort at change, right, Art and Simon?
Or am I mishearing their points?