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Thread: The Green New Deal Can’t Break The Laws Of Physics

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    Default The Green New Deal Can’t Break The Laws Of Physics

    I can't for the life of me see why anybody would consider this in the least controversial. Well anybody with even a basic grounding in science and technology and without a left wing agenda.

    Elections, as everyone now says, have toconsequences. But they can’t change the laws of physics.

    That matters, even in this hypertrophied political season, because one of the policy choices in play this election is whether or not to embrace a Green New Deal or one of its variants. But the Green New Deal has at its core an impossibility in physics: the idea of “free” and “renewable” energy.

    The monetary, environmental and geopolitical costs of energy technologies all derive from nature’s constraints. And the physics of all energy sources, whether wind and sun or oil and gas, share the same core features. All exist in nature, for free. But that’s irrelevant. One has to pay landowners (private or governmental) to access locations where useful resources are located. Then one purchases machines, built from materials extracted from the earth, in order to convert any resource into a form that can be delivered to people. Since all machines wear out, there is nothing truly “renewable” about any of them.

    Thus, the invisible elephant in the room with a Green New Deal, whether implemented by federal or state governments, is the staggering quantity of stuff that needs to be mined in order to build all the green machines, and where that mining and processing happens. (RELATED: Trump Authorizes Moon Mining, Media Ignores Awesomeness)

    Consider the ever-popular electric car. In a recent report for the Manhattan Institute, I took a look at the physical realities of these increasingly popular vehicles and found they weren’t as eco-friendly as they purported to be. The one million electric vehicles (EVs) now on U.S. roads (courtesy of billions of dollars in subsidies) account for just 0.5% of America’s cars but contain, for example, more cobalt than one billion smartphones. In general, fabricating a single EV battery, each of which weighs about 1,000 pounds, requires digging up roughly 500,000 pounds of materials. That’s more than a 10-fold increase in the cumulative quantity of materials (liquids) used by a standard car over its entire operating life.

    Some EV materials are the rare-earth elements, such as neodymium, that are now in the news. Many other, more familiar elements are also needed, in particular copper and nickel. EVs use twice as much copper as conventional cars, and global demand for nickel to make batteries is forecast to rise 1,500% in the coming decades. Overall, the global push for EVs will drive a 200% to 8,000% increase in demand for an entire suite of “critical” energy minerals. All of this will be in service of reducing—not eliminating—oil demand. In fact, two decades from now, barely 10% of the world’s petroleum use will be eliminated if the optimistic forecasts (some already enshrined in government mandates) are realized and there are 500 million EVs on the world’s roads.

    And the quantities of minerals used in EVs will be dwarfed by the push for grid-scale batteries to make wind and solar usefully reliable. Those solar panels and wind turbines also entail using an average of 10 times more primary materials to produce the same energy output compared to hydrocarbon machines. The world is literally about to embark on the biggest increase in mineral and metal mining in history.

    But America has long been a hostile place to try and open new mines. Consequently, the U.S. is 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals and imports over half its needs for another 28. The net effect of a Green New Deal distills to replacing domestic energy production (and exports) of hydrocarbons with an unprecedented level of energy mineral imports. You won’t find environmental organizations and Green New Deal proponents calling for expanding domestic mining. But the mineral realities have economic and geopolitical implications.

    China, for example, supplies about 90% of rare-earths for the world. On the cobalt front, China has also quietly gained control over more than 90% of the battery industry’s cobalt refining, without which the raw ore is useless. Russia is a massive nickel producer. The list of dependencies is long, and it rarely includes American sources. In early October, the Chinese government advanced legislation to be enacted in 2021 that will “allow” banning exports of “strategic minerals” to companies and nations that China considers a national security threat. (RELATED: China Claims Economy Grew Almost 5% In The Third Quarter Of 2020 Despite Pandemic)

    Then we have the environmental and moral questions inherent with green mineral supply chains. Australia’s Institute for Sustainable Futures cautions that a global gold rush for energy minerals will take miners into “some remote wilderness areas [that] have maintained high biodiversity because they haven’t yet been disturbed.”

    Add to this the widely reportedly cases of abuse related to child labor in mines in the Congo, for example, where 70% of the world’s raw cobalt originates. Last year, Tesla, Apple, Google, Dell, and Microsoft were accused in a lawsuit (filed in a U.S. federal court) of exploiting child labor in the Congo. Similar connections have been made to labor abuses associated with copper, nickel and other “critical” mines around the world.

    The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 included requirements to report trade in “conflict minerals” and indeed most companies have pledged “ethical sourcing.” Unfortunately, history shows there isn’t much of a correlation between pledges and the frequency of abuse in many foreign mines. There is nothing new about all this. What’s new is the prospect of an astronomical increase in demand for energy minerals.

    Meanwhile, America doesn’t need to source foreign minerals right now since imports account for 90% of U.S. solar panels and 80% of the key power components of wind turbines. Asian companies utterly dominate global battery production.

    In timeframes that are meaningful, say over the coming decade, radically increasing the use of Green New Deal machines will have the effect of exporting jobs, exporting environmental challenges (not to mention exacerbating human rights challenges), causing the trade deficit to soar by hundreds of billions of dollars, and of course eliminating domestic hydrocarbon jobs which contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to the GDP.

    You don’t have to ban fracking to kill the industry; mandating the use of the alternatives has the same effect. This won’t end well. (RELATED: Joe Biden Denies Ever Saying He Opposed Fracking But Promises To Eliminate Oil Industry)

    If all that weren’t enough, there’s also the roughly 20 to 100-fold increase in land use that comes with using green machines to replace hydrocarbons. And, of course, there’s the mother’s milk of a Green New Deal, the trillions of dollars in subsidies, necessarily funded by increased costs and taxes for all consumers. The latter is no longer in dispute; instead those costs now seem to be a feature not a bug in Green New Deal proposals.

    By the way, if green machines were in fact cheaper than conventional ones, as many media outlets now assert as an adjective attached to the words wind, solar or batteries, markets would rapidly adopt them without subsidies and mandates.

    Perceptive readers will note that nothing has been said about climate change thus far. That’s because the physics of energy, of what’s possible, isn’t dictated by either the political climate or the planet’s climate.

    But it does bear noting that the radical expansion of green machines won’t spell the end of oil and gas. Consider the latest forecast from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a reliable booster for Green New Deals in all their forms. The IEA predicts solar and wind—which today supply less than three percent of the world’s energy—will dominate the growth in energy supply. That will require, the IEA notes, that every nation follow through on “announced [green] policy intentions and targets.” Many of those “intentions” are already remarkably aggressive, including the outright banning of conventional cars and power plants.

    We’ll see if they in fact happen.

    Meanwhile, even with all that, the IEA forecasts the world’s use of both natural gas and petroleum will return to the pre-COVID peak within a couple of years and then even creep higher for nearly two decades.

    That same IEA report has just one sentence on the subject of energy minerals, noting the need to consider that “reliable supplies of the critical minerals and metals … are vital” for reaching green goals. History may see that as the understatement of the decade.
    https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/27/g...ws-of-physics/

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    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Grajonca View Post
    I can't for the life of me see why anybody would consider this in the least controversial. Well anybody with even a basic grounding in science and technology and without a left wing agenda.



    https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/27/g...ws-of-physics/
    The laws of physics are a social construct created by rich white european males to oppress minorities so that can expand their wealth. I am starting an initiative, the Newton Project 1643 to help unwoke whites overcome their unconscious physicsism.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Yakuda View Post
    The laws of physics are a social construct created by rich white european males to oppress minorities so that can expand their wealth. I am starting an initiative, the Newton Project 1643 to help unwoke whites overcome their unconscious physicsism.
    Yes that makes perfect sense!

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    Who said it doesn't cost money and resources to build them?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grajonca View Post
    I can't for the life of me see why anybody would consider this in the least controversial. Well anybody with even a basic grounding in science and technology and without a left wing agenda.



    https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/27/g...ws-of-physics/
    WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A PART-TIME BARTENDER BECOMES A "SELF ANNOINTED" EXPERT ON ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY, ECONOMICS, AND PHYSICS....
    TRUMP WILL TAKE FORTY STATES...UNLESS THE SAME IDIOTS WHO BROUGHT US THE 2020 DUNCE-O-CRAT IOWA CLUSTERFUCK CONTINUE THEIR SEDITIOUS ACTIVITIES...THEN HE WILL WIN EVEN MORE ..UNLESS THE RED CHINESE AND DNC COLLUDE, USE A PANDEMIC, AND THEN THE DEMOCRATS VIOLATE ARTICLE II OF THE CONSTITUTION, TO FACILLITATE MILLIONS OF ILLEGAL, UNVETTED, MAIL IN BALLOTS IN THE DARK OF NIGHT..


    De Oppresso Liber

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    Quote Originally Posted by AProudLefty View Post
    Who said it doesn't cost money and resources to build them?
    I can't count the number of times some smart Alec has stated that the wind and the Sun are free!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grajonca View Post
    I can't count the number of times some smart Alec has stated that the wind and the Sun are free!
    Who's pumping the wind and sun power?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grajonca View Post
    I can't for the life of me see why anybody would consider this in the least controversial. Well anybody with even a basic grounding in science and technology and without a left wing agenda.

    https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/27/g...ws-of-physics/
    Doesn't mean they won't try... The Left never considers the practicality of their actions or the costs. They want what they want and that's that. It's one of the major reasons they fail so miserably at everything.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grokmaster View Post
    WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A PART-TIME BARTENDER BECOMES A "SELF ANNOINTED" EXPERT ON ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY, ECONOMICS, AND PHYSICS....
    If the bar is in San Francisco or New York City, sales go up... When the bartender becomes a Congress critter, the economy tanks.

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    Quote Originally Posted by T. A. Gardner View Post
    Doesn't mean they won't try... The Left never considers the practicality of their actions or the costs. They want what they want and that's that. It's one of the major reasons they fail so miserably at everything.
    Outstanding.

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    How sad that someone would take so much time to conjure up arguments against common sense.

    Fossil fuels are finite sources. The end.

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    Quote Originally Posted by BartenderElite View Post
    How sad that someone would take so much time to conjure up arguments against common sense.

    Fossil fuels are finite sources. The end.
    Nuclear is not. You agree?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Sailor View Post
    Nuclear is not. You agree?
    Nuke is not, and I have been very conflicted on it, because it is a clean and plentiful resource.

    But when you look at all aspects of it, it is generationally irresponsible. We really don't know how to handle the waste - along with other problematic issues surrounding the constant need for maintaining and monitoring nuclear facilities.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Sailor View Post
    Nuclear is not. You agree?
    Uranium is finite.

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    Quote Originally Posted by T. A. Gardner View Post
    Doesn't mean they won't try... The Left never considers the practicality of their actions or the costs. They want what they want and that's that. It's one of the major reasons they fail so miserably at everything.
    Sadly that does seem to be the case as often as not.

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