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Why Sustainable Power Is Unsustainable
Urchin writes "Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, the most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources including indium and platinum —
resources that could dry up in 10-15 years if they were widely used in the renewable energy market."
Who would pay for an exploration team to go around, looking for new sources of a material that was already abundant? Answer: no-one. As a consequence, a lot of "rare" minerals only have a known source that will last a couple of decades - or less. Until they become scare and the price rises, there's no profit in spending money looking for new reserves.
In the 70's the big scare was that there was only 15 years worth of (known) oil reserves left. Hey, we didn't run out. When the price went up, that incentivised people to go out and find new sources.
Same when I was doing electronics design in the early 80's - there was a scare that we'd run out of tantalum (for capacitors).
Scares aren't new and tend to have a way of working themselves out. Even if one metal did become to prices - i.e. scarce, no doubt processes will be invented to use a different material.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Sorry, but that's a bullshit answer.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
Ok, IRTFA. Sheesh, talk about using bazookas to swat flies. Is this anything more than FUD to scare people back to coal? Let me spell it out:
Solar-thermal plants using mirrors, steam turbines, and if you want 24/7, underground heat reservoirs. Completely buildable using some of the more common materials on the planet: sand, steel, concrete, copper, salt, etcetera. Who cares if they're inefficient compared to the super-fancy super-rare stuff in TFA, just build lots of them.
Maintenance? Bugger all in comparison to a coal plant, the bloody things run on sunshine. There's no toxic+radioactive coal dust/ash/soot getting into everything, no gas-guzzling trucks and trains leaving said dust billowing in their wake over nearby towns and farms as they go between mine and plant... blah blah bloody blah.
There are only three real reasons that the countries with plenty of sunshine (e.g. my own) haven't gone this route long ago: vested greed, common ignorance, short-term thinking.
TFA is complete BS, at least in terms of platinum.
I work for a company which is in the process of adding several centuries' supply of PGEs (platinum group elements) to proven reserves. Platinum and fuel cells are going to get a lot cheaper, within 10 years.
We know where PGEs are, but it's often in politically unstable places, or those that are busy strangling their domestic exploration industry (e.g. Canada).
This global recession will likely help finally unjam a lot of political roadblocks. When people are hurting, they don't tolerate environmental protests as much, and aren't as willing to turn a blind eye to eco-terrorism, which has wracked the industry in the last decade. Even the first world is finding it harder to ignore potentially adding a hundred billion to one's GDP for decades.
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One small nickel-iron type asteroid will also yield plenty of platinum, iridium and similar metals. Heck, there's still some disagreement over what they're mining in Sudbury, Ontario, is there because of magma upwelling after the original impact (circa 2bya) or remnants of the original impactor.
Separating them out can be done in space with a number of processes using large reflectors and solar heating. (Zone refining, fractional distillation, carbonyl extraction, etc..)
If we'd had the guts to start moving towards that when some people first started suggesting it seriously, we'd be there or nearly so by now.
-- Alastair
"75 of 77 climate scientists who are active publishers on climate change said yes." Re-read that sentence. Read it again, carefully. One more time, please. Can you see now, that only certain select scientists are being held forth as an example of some "consensus"?
You do realize that there can be lots of people who earned a degree studying climate & meteorology, then moved on to be weatherman (or something) and stopped giving a crap about scientific research, right? Well, that's why you just ask the scientists are are publishing. Research and publishing go hand in hand. They're the ones that'll know the most. Did you major in any field of science? Because if so, you should have known that. Anyway, you appear to have not read the article you yourself cited.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change [...] Of these specialists, 96.2 % answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% answered yes to question 2.
The bold part there should have been a clue for you. Scientists who actively publish are doing real scientific research. If you're doing scientific research on something, you're gonna know more about that something than people who don't.
"The popular opinion of the scientific community makes the science (as established through years of peer-reviewed published literature). That's how science works." That is not accurate. Years of peer-reviewed published literature showed us that there was an "aether" or "ether" in space, which provided some sort of framework on which the universe was based, or constructed. That aether supposedly formed a medium by which visible light and other forms of radiation were transmitted. It was only in the last century that the concept was proven wrong. Real science consists of observing the physical universe, drawing conclusions, and testing those conclusions to prove or to disprove the conclusions. It simply doesn't MATTER how many people THINK that the original hypothesis was right, or how vocal they are about their belief. It doesn't even matter if there is some silly thing like a "consensus" among scientists. The rest of your post is hardly worth considering. As I said, at least twice in pre-history, those carbon levels shot extremely high. You dismiss that fact with the idea that it wasn't the same earth. It almost seems that you believe the laws of physics have changed dramatically at some point in the earth's history. I certainly hope you aren't trying to pass your SELF off as some kind of a climatologist? Please, we already have to many self-acclaimed climatologists making noise out there.
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