Going green is a wonderful idea, not using up a limited resource in favour of utilising an unlimited one seems a "no brainer" but as ever, the theory is one thing and the practice is another.
Green is not so clean.
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9 comments:
£Excellent. I do so love 'facts'.
Space is a limited resource -how much space does renewables take compared to e.g nuclear.
(Of course nuclear needs to be mined as well but you get a lot of energy for a small amount of metal).
Worstall debunked that post this morning: Ignorant tosspottery
PJH, that's a classic of "the figures are slightly wrong so we can ignore the entire problem" genre of argument.
It's not that the figures are slightly wrong, they are absurdly, massively wrong and the argument is mistaken
The basic argument is correct, that the energy costs of making the machines by which "green" energy is generated are never taken into account, nor is it conceded that nearly all that energy cost is energy that is not "green". In any case, Mr Worstall's arguments fall into exactly the same trap as the ones he is trying to debunk, for instance,
"The amount of rock processed to get gallium is zero. Absolutely nothing."
However that doesn't mean it doesn't still take a very large amount of energy to extract gallium from bauxite, nor vanadium from iron ore. The author may be wrong about the rock, but the argument about energy still stands. Nor is there any indication about from where gallium and vanadium are got when the amounts extracted as by-products are insufficient to meet the demand.
Added to which he completely glosses over the need for lithium for batteries, which isn't obtained from a by-product, also that if it takes 2,645,550 pounds of ore to get 2.2 pounds of lutetium, the fact that 35,275 pounds of that ore contain 2.2 pounds of cerium is neither here nor there. 2,645,550 pounds of ore is still a very large number.
So yes, John Lee Pettimore's figures are incorrect, but that doesn't affect the basic argument, that green isn't clean, because it's still demonstrated by the correct figures.
B. Quite.
But that's what greenies are saying. That is our whole way of life based on cheap energy is wrong. Therefore we need to find another way to live without energy at all. It's totally bonkers, of course.
But those that would presume to rule us have managed to exploit the greenie creed to push their power and central planning agenda. It's an alliance of evil in my opinion.
The $64,000 question is, how do we stop all this lunacy?
L, it's just rent-seeking. The Greenies want to return to the C18th, but they want to be the aristos, not the peasants. When I was a teenager, my mother got very interested in self-sufficiency and bought a manual on it. I read it and realised that being self-sufficient was very hard work indeed for a fairly miserable lifestyle, at least in these northern latitudes.
B. True. True.
FWIW I live in the sticks and could easily be 'self-sufficient'. But, luckily, I am bone idle...
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