WTH_Progs?
Diamond Member
- Feb 19, 2019
- 12,229
- 10,319
- 2,140
We're back in the Paris Accord (puke). Trump dropped it because it was worthless though benefitted China to our detriment, so thank golly Biden re-entered the accord, because he's bitch'n.
I wonder if this is all just a scare tactic hence money grab? Is it realistic to believe humans can curb climate change, really? Fuck I don't know, if anything seems there are just too many people no matter what we do, climate change sounds like BS to me. Say, did you know China makes most of the solar panels? Same with batteries, what a surprise.
How beautiful are solar, wind & batteries? Since when are any of these things done without harming the environment & processing fossil fuels?
The materials extracted from the earth to fabricate wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries (to store grid electricity or power electric vehicles) are out of sight, located at remote quarries, mine sites, and mineral-processing facilities around the world. Those locations matter in terms of geopolitics and supply-chain risks, as well as in environmental terms. Before considering the supply chain, it is important to understand the scale of the material demands. For green energy, it all begins with the fact that such sources are land-intensive and very diffuse.
For example, replacing the energy output from a single 100-MW natural gas-fired turbine, itself about the size of a residential house (producing enough electricity for 75,000 homes), requires at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles of land.[4]
Building those wind machines consumes enormous quantities of conventional materials, including concrete, steel, and fiberglass, along with less common materials, including “rare earth” elements such as dysprosium. A World Bank study noted what every mining engineer knows: “[T]echnologies assumed to populate the clean energy shift … are in fact significantly more material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems.”[5]
I wonder if this is all just a scare tactic hence money grab? Is it realistic to believe humans can curb climate change, really? Fuck I don't know, if anything seems there are just too many people no matter what we do, climate change sounds like BS to me. Say, did you know China makes most of the solar panels? Same with batteries, what a surprise.
How beautiful are solar, wind & batteries? Since when are any of these things done without harming the environment & processing fossil fuels?
The materials extracted from the earth to fabricate wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries (to store grid electricity or power electric vehicles) are out of sight, located at remote quarries, mine sites, and mineral-processing facilities around the world. Those locations matter in terms of geopolitics and supply-chain risks, as well as in environmental terms. Before considering the supply chain, it is important to understand the scale of the material demands. For green energy, it all begins with the fact that such sources are land-intensive and very diffuse.
For example, replacing the energy output from a single 100-MW natural gas-fired turbine, itself about the size of a residential house (producing enough electricity for 75,000 homes), requires at least 20 wind turbines, each one about the size of the Washington Monument, occupying some 10 square miles of land.[4]
Building those wind machines consumes enormous quantities of conventional materials, including concrete, steel, and fiberglass, along with less common materials, including “rare earth” elements such as dysprosium. A World Bank study noted what every mining engineer knows: “[T]echnologies assumed to populate the clean energy shift … are in fact significantly more material intensive in their composition than current traditional fossil-fuel-based energy supply systems.”[5]
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