Madam
I believe, based on your last 660 or so posts on the political forums that you are able to distil or frame anyone’s post into something that allows you to restate - yet again - your point about the current energy crisis being due to a lack of investment in fossil fuel exploration and development.
Your oft repeated and beautifully simplified mantra “not enough supply, growing demand, hence skyrocketing fossil fuel prices” superficially seems to make sense.
However, what it lacks is CONTEXT.
The starting point is that there simply is no question, that the world must transition to net zero emissions. Most nations – not me personally, not just your so called green climate change fascists, but mostly the majority elected governments of the world (including a number of autocratic regimes) - have committed to net zero emissions by 2050, 2060 or 2070. The fundamental driver for this decision of course is man-made climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. What you like to portray as the radical agenda of a small but influential minority group is indeed majority policy – all around the world.
To put it more bluntly, either we transition to renewable energy or we will be left with no energy at all, since the burning of fossil fuel will very quickly become untenable – hence the term “stranded assets”.
https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-stranded-assets/1/pdf_stranded-assets.pdf
As an aside, man-made climate change deniers often take exceptions at the label “denier” (at the same time they seem happy to label their opponents fascists, energy imperialists, socialists, woke or whatever). They claim that this moniker has been thought up deliberately to draw parallels with Holocaust deniers or simply protest that it represents unconscionable pigeon holing.
Without delving into the origins of the label, your posts remind me far more about “denial” in the context of drug addiction. The case in point are your latest series of posts. Let’s remind ourselves of the phases of denial in relation to man-made climate change:
1.) Deny the Problem Exists…
2.) Deny we are the Cause…
3.) Deny it is a Problem…
4.) Deny we can Solve it…
5.) It is too Late
So now you argue that even if we had the financial wherewithal, we simply could not manage a transition, because of “
the principles of physics, geology and mining engineering”…. i.e. deny we can solve it.
I actually consider the real constraint for the transition to be a lack of unity of purpose and imagination to make the transition happen. At the same time, I do not use the lack of unity of purpose as an excuse argue to do nothing or carry on business as usual.
To reiterate, the world agrees that we must transition, so it is merely a question of doing so as fast as possible. The powerful fossil fuel industry has managed to delay this transition for decades, so now the timeframe during which the transition needs to occur seems challenging.
However, the only option is to push ahead and try our best, to fail forward.
I note that in your above post, you once again highlight the required “21 times increase” in cobalt production as “simply unattainable”. Again, I note that during the last quarter, Tesla announced that about half its batteries no longer contain any cobalt.
So I doubt that the IEA projections account for the possibility of substitution, which can and will happen, whenever a material is too scarce or too expensive.
You also highlight nickel and point to the low growth in production growth over the past indicating the apparent “impossibility” of ramping up to the levels required for the transition. Strange that a nickel industry body like the Nickel Institute addresses this very issue but does not think there are physical constraints:
https://nickelinstitute.org/en/blog/2020/january/reserves-resources-and-recycling-is-there-enough-nickel/ There are obviously limits as to how quickly production can ramp up. But yes, the longer we delay ramping up production, the longer the inevitable transition will take and the more impossible the task will appear.
Renewable energy and EVs are still relatively new industries that are only just moving into large scale mass production. 20-year projections are bound to be massively inaccurate and do not account for the possibility of substitution, as highlighted in the cobalt example. However, we must push ahead with the transition given the urgency of the climate change situation.
The answer cannot be to shrug our shoulders and continue burning fossil fuels.
Another problem with your mindset is that you are still locked into the idea of endless consumption. You are used to looking at annual production numbers for oil and gas then project these out forever into future decades. As we switch to renewable energy, once the new generation or conversion infrastructure is in place to cover demand, the need for new future materials for infrastructure materials will drop dramatically, as we move from building the new infrastructure to merely maintaining it – remembering that the source energy itself is unlimited and free.
The switch to renewable energy is only one facet of moving towards sustainability.
As mentioned before, one of the key reasons I was excited about buying a Tesla was that Tesla was not only switching to EVs, but more importantly, is moving rapidly towards autonomous driving. Eventually, this will blow out many material requirement projections for the transition to renewable energy, be it IEA or industry body forecasts.
Now, some man-made climate change deniers will try and say that to reach 2050 net zero emission will be achieved in the fullness of time by “future technological change” and that this allows little or no action to be taken at present. I say, to achieve net zero by 2050 requires an epic effort and unless we begin it now, it will indeed become more difficult to achieve in the timelines that we are targeting at present.
If we accelerate towards sustainability, mistakes will be made and we are almost certainly not going to find the optimum path to get there, given the time pressure we now find ourselves in. Many of those mistakes could have been avoided had we started seriously working towards sustainability 40 years ago instead of paying mere lip service to the transition or denying that it was necessary.
