Hopefully thus is the last gasp of a disgusting species that is in the final stages of ripping apart the planet.
I was in dawson city yesterday on my way to the top of the world highway....on the approach to the town remain unsightly heaps of stones....
I assumed these were recently discarded waste rock from ongoing mining ops as nothing was growingbin ir sround them....I was told that no...these are historic slag heaps from the gold rush of the late 1800s....and as such they cannot be removed or covered over...
130 yrs later...and still a mess...imagine the disaster in China from tearing up the ground.
Alas mother earth will have all eternity to heal these scars once our brief and disgraceful time here is done.
I look forward to the great extinction and the end of history.
Beautifully said. Have you ever been to Mount Rushmore? Those same disgusting slag heaps of unused and unmovable rock are present under the faces. In the visitor center you can see a before and after picture. The before picture was so beautiful. The site was once a scared place of worship and was beautiful. The only real tragedy now is all the flora and fauna that will still be wiped off the face of the Earth as humans drive themselves to extinction. Will Earth be able to support complex life after humans burn themselves out? Or will the Earth be so forever damaged that it will be reduced to support nothing more complex than single celled life once again?
I was in the region a few months ago....I had no interest in going there...I didn't go to the geyser in yellostone....I recoil at mass tourism
I am currently parked on a riverbed 20km outside chicken alaska....earlier I very large wolf trotted across the road as I was driving on the top of the world rd from yukon
That sounds wonderful. I think you are right we are on the very edge of destroying ourselves & our once beautiful world, and sadly taking all the wonderful wildlife with us. Hopefully some will survive, as for the Human Race we don't deserve to.
Of the non coal alternative energy sources (both for thermal AND electrification) natural gas is most attractive, fastest & easiest to implement, far less polluting than coal burning. Which is a large part of the actual reasons why a US fleet is blockading the Persian Gulf and US/Israeli political class thugs are trying to bait/false flag/bribe/(Lord, please, ANYTHING!) Iran into destroying their neighbor's LNG infrastructures and wreck the water desalination infrastructures required to maintain the population on those strategic littoral areas.
China MIGHT be able to use coal/coal to liquids as a bridge towards nuclear fission-electric build out. But that won't be fast, easy or low impact when the inevitable accidents and contamination occur. Any "Chernobyl in China" will be exponentially worse than in Ukraine.
If any country can crack nuclear fusion to electric at a useful efficiency & scale, it would be China, with the most geniuses of any country on earth and a pragmatic government- The USA has too many powerful invested interests in hydrocarbons and enjoys the leverage that controlling that "prize" world wide has given us (and our economy depends on the monetary system we previously required everyone use to deal in it!).
A reasonable question to ask is could they build this all out before they run out of every other resource necessary for their pillage and destroy industrial economy?
When you mix in the vagaries of climate change and it’s destructive effect on infrastructure and it’s continuous alteration of the operating conditions for infrastructure. It’s hard to imagine that all of the insane water projects they are undertaking will do anything like the imagine it will.
Russia yes has very much been sort of a resource input for China at this point. Also, geopolitically, Russia is the perfect decoy to bleed off attention. The Chinese aren’t stupid and they understand how to play geopolitics very effectively just like the Persians.
Specifically as to steel: last year China invented a new method which makes steel 3600 times as fast as western mills—seconds instead of hours—by powdering the iron ore and blowing it into the furnace, where it melted upon contact with the heated wall and absorbed carbon as it dripped. Iron powder entered, liquid steel exited.
Laws of thermodynamics still apply, no matter what the throughput speed of primary iron ore reduction might be.
CO is the active species in iron reduction, you still need all the heat, just as much carbon per oxygen atom removed/molecule of iron oxide reduced- and modern conventional blast furnaces are pretty well optimized for heat efficiency, with insulation, checker chambers to scavenge heat for pre heating blast air, co generation of electricity from hot exhaust.
By all means, please do present some numbers on efficiency claims vs. conventional blast method and links to your primary sources, good to discuss this further than the Sunday Science Supplement click bait level.
Since that publication was 2006, am I correct in understanding that this means the process has been understood for 20 years? As with everything in heavy industry, they are not prone to simply dropping existing production facilities to build something completely new because economics.
I have some scant experience with the steel industry being in a job that did remote sensing instrumentation for heavy industry for a year or two. They don’t simply rip out tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and drop in something new overnight.
"I expect the United States to grab this opportunity trying to put a squeeze on and to gain leverage over the Chinese economy."
In the "decades ahead" you still expect the US to be capable of this? US military power and economic power, right now, is crumbling away in front of our eyes. The US will be lucky not to be sending diplomats to China in a vain attempt to buy food parcels in a decade or so.
Not a word about WHY coal is so important to China. Its high EROI vs oil and gas. 50:1 for coal. 20:1 for oil. 5:1 for natural gas. These are broad global averages so don't nitpick my numbers. The principle is sound. Absorb the principle.
Yes, B, we still use fossil fuels to power our economies and reduce metal ores and make organic chemicals. We will do so until they run out entirely, but along the way we will develop other technologies to do a lot of these things, even though they will cost more. We will also change our economies to suit, while starting to scale everything down. If the oligarchs continue to take most of the resources, eventually there will be revolutions or wars (these have started already). It will all happen in the midst of people like you and me telling them it can’t go on. If the race survives, then it will eventually adapt to the new ways, probably with massive upheavals. We will NOT make objective, rational decisions and mitigate the crash, especially on the national level. That’s just the way it is. And still, I’m optimistic that beauty will prevail, as it currently does. Thanks and enjoy!
Electric arc furnaces are only effective for refining steel if you also have something like Carbon or Hydrogen, Yielding CO2 or H2O, to strip away the Oxygen from the iron Oxide ore.
Arc furnaces are primarily used when recycling scrap metal that has already been refined once.
Lets end the myth of the coal-driven China as the posterchild for renewable (rebuildable) energy. The message has always been clear: renewable energy infrastructure is largely impossible without fossil energy and large-scale material extraction. Its installation is largely not replacing fossil energy use. Listen-up environmentalists.
Hello, not intended. There is a wide diversity of views. The recent trend I have seen is a movement away from Nature to solving global heating with renewables. This is leading to a lot of habitat destruction. Yes, use less energy, but that isn't highlighted in a lot of recent movements. I suspect we agree on a lot.
(Доверяй, но проверяй) “ it has always been Reduce Energy Use “. I have walked K street and No environmentalists , big money environmentalists, gave up on minimalism a long time ago.
The only thing that ever scared the machine was when we were happy to be dirt poor hippies. Tune in , turn on , and drop out. Minimalism , energy minimalism and accounting were easily killed by big money and modern NGO organisational goals.
Earth can't comfortably support all its people. I was always fascinated by Tierra del Fuego and its inhospitable remoteness. Now there's a town of 200.000 + and is a tourist attraction
"The windy conditions during the winter months can make it difficult for ships to navigate through the waters, and the choppy waves are often too strong for people to safely pass through. For that reason, plan your Tierra del Fuego adventure between the months of March through May, which is when the water is safe enough for ships to navigate.
The timing coincides with the scheduled departure times of our Antarctic Explorer: Discovering the 7th Continent Plus Cape Horn and Diego Ramirez adventure. This is a 13 day journey that will take you to the borders of the Lemaire Channel in Antarctica itself. Very few people can say they’ve visited one of the southernmost locations in the world, but you have that opportunity on this unforgettable voyage."
This is something I've been wondering about as well. Though if the increasing prices of running fossil fuel power plants pushes most of them out of the grid, the available supplies of coal, oil and gas could extend by decades, in some optimistic cases centuries, which is fine by me.
Wouldn't be easy though...or fast, since one of the primary reasons for this lackluster transition is how cheap fossil fuels still are.
Disregarding any other obstacles for a moment: as long as continued operation of a coal power plant is cheaper than tearing it down, replacing it with renewables+storage and operating that, we will keep using the coal plant
I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s always important to remember the observation of Jevons. When you take into consideration, economic growth, alternative energies end up being an add to the overall industrial base. The repeated experiment is the cheap alternative produces economic expansion, and the thing it replaces continues to be utilized, although perhaps for different purposes.
That is important to keep in mind, but Jevons paradox, like most 'universal' truths stops being so clear-cut when it's applied to a broad concept like power generation.
What you said is 100% true, but only as long as the old stuff remains cheap and easily accessible too. The resource situation of the near and especially the far future is unprecedented.
Something else I want to mention here, because I don't see this being said often: The overly excited techno-optimist climate communicators have portrayed the global energy transition as something simple and quick, and I feel like this was a massive mistake.
It is a unique project, we've never done that before (only at most on country-scale), but even assuming such a global transition is possible it does not happen quickly or easily. It has phases.
Since our entire civilization was built on the fossil fuel platform, and we don't have the option of turning it off, there will inevitably be a time when the alternatives are just added to the grid and don't displace anything. I've never seen this as a failure, it's a necessity to keep everything running while the new stuff is being built. Since the economy is still growing, there will be increasing power demand too, which would swallow renewable deployment, as it did. The next phase would be when deployment outpaces growth, but that kind of speed needs to be incentivized either through the old stuff becoming expensive, or demand for fossil fuels exceeding the supply, and leaving the doors open for something else to take its place.
Since B already wrote lots of highly informative paragraphs about the various hurdles of manufacturing renewables, I'd rather not get lost in those details now. My point is that even if I just look at a realistic model of what a global energy transition would look like, this apparent adherence to Jevons paradox would inevitably happen, though it does not have to be permanent. In the real world it still could prove inescapable for us. I would however hesitate to apply this concept broadly in such an unprecedented situation as the present.
No argument there about the techno optimists. Since learning something of the resource exhaustion, I’ve drawn a considerable amount of anger on my head pointing out that swapping out energy sources is not going to be the panacea.
If climate base destruction doesn’t fragment, the global economy. The resource constraints definitely will. I am more optimistic about the world, traditional cultures all the “poor people” . They have an ability out of necessity to change their lifestyles and do something different while we don’t. Modernity is incredibly fragile in this way massive all consuming, but incredibly fragile.
Hopefully thus is the last gasp of a disgusting species that is in the final stages of ripping apart the planet.
I was in dawson city yesterday on my way to the top of the world highway....on the approach to the town remain unsightly heaps of stones....
I assumed these were recently discarded waste rock from ongoing mining ops as nothing was growingbin ir sround them....I was told that no...these are historic slag heaps from the gold rush of the late 1800s....and as such they cannot be removed or covered over...
130 yrs later...and still a mess...imagine the disaster in China from tearing up the ground.
Alas mother earth will have all eternity to heal these scars once our brief and disgraceful time here is done.
I look forward to the great extinction and the end of history.
Beautifully said. Have you ever been to Mount Rushmore? Those same disgusting slag heaps of unused and unmovable rock are present under the faces. In the visitor center you can see a before and after picture. The before picture was so beautiful. The site was once a scared place of worship and was beautiful. The only real tragedy now is all the flora and fauna that will still be wiped off the face of the Earth as humans drive themselves to extinction. Will Earth be able to support complex life after humans burn themselves out? Or will the Earth be so forever damaged that it will be reduced to support nothing more complex than single celled life once again?
I was in the region a few months ago....I had no interest in going there...I didn't go to the geyser in yellostone....I recoil at mass tourism
I am currently parked on a riverbed 20km outside chicken alaska....earlier I very large wolf trotted across the road as I was driving on the top of the world rd from yukon
That sounds wonderful. I think you are right we are on the very edge of destroying ourselves & our once beautiful world, and sadly taking all the wonderful wildlife with us. Hopefully some will survive, as for the Human Race we don't deserve to.
Of the non coal alternative energy sources (both for thermal AND electrification) natural gas is most attractive, fastest & easiest to implement, far less polluting than coal burning. Which is a large part of the actual reasons why a US fleet is blockading the Persian Gulf and US/Israeli political class thugs are trying to bait/false flag/bribe/(Lord, please, ANYTHING!) Iran into destroying their neighbor's LNG infrastructures and wreck the water desalination infrastructures required to maintain the population on those strategic littoral areas.
China MIGHT be able to use coal/coal to liquids as a bridge towards nuclear fission-electric build out. But that won't be fast, easy or low impact when the inevitable accidents and contamination occur. Any "Chernobyl in China" will be exponentially worse than in Ukraine.
If any country can crack nuclear fusion to electric at a useful efficiency & scale, it would be China, with the most geniuses of any country on earth and a pragmatic government- The USA has too many powerful invested interests in hydrocarbons and enjoys the leverage that controlling that "prize" world wide has given us (and our economy depends on the monetary system we previously required everyone use to deal in it!).
A reasonable question to ask is could they build this all out before they run out of every other resource necessary for their pillage and destroy industrial economy?
When you mix in the vagaries of climate change and it’s destructive effect on infrastructure and it’s continuous alteration of the operating conditions for infrastructure. It’s hard to imagine that all of the insane water projects they are undertaking will do anything like the imagine it will.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
“before they run out of every other resource necessary for their pillage and destroy industrial economy?”
—————
Notice that the US has driven Russian Federation (with their huge natural resources base) into China's arms?
Russia yes has very much been sort of a resource input for China at this point. Also, geopolitically, Russia is the perfect decoy to bleed off attention. The Chinese aren’t stupid and they understand how to play geopolitics very effectively just like the Persians.
Specifically as to steel: last year China invented a new method which makes steel 3600 times as fast as western mills—seconds instead of hours—by powdering the iron ore and blowing it into the furnace, where it melted upon contact with the heated wall and absorbed carbon as it dripped. Iron powder entered, liquid steel exited.
@Isaac Kellogg
Laws of thermodynamics still apply, no matter what the throughput speed of primary iron ore reduction might be.
CO is the active species in iron reduction, you still need all the heat, just as much carbon per oxygen atom removed/molecule of iron oxide reduced- and modern conventional blast furnaces are pretty well optimized for heat efficiency, with insulation, checker chambers to scavenge heat for pre heating blast air, co generation of electricity from hot exhaust.
By all means, please do present some numbers on efficiency claims vs. conventional blast method and links to your primary sources, good to discuss this further than the Sunday Science Supplement click bait level.
(Edit)
First thing Google turns up...
https://www.nipponsteel.com/en/tech/report/nsc/pdf/n9423.pdf
Since that publication was 2006, am I correct in understanding that this means the process has been understood for 20 years? As with everything in heavy industry, they are not prone to simply dropping existing production facilities to build something completely new because economics.
I have some scant experience with the steel industry being in a job that did remote sensing instrumentation for heavy industry for a year or two. They don’t simply rip out tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and drop in something new overnight.
"I expect the United States to grab this opportunity trying to put a squeeze on and to gain leverage over the Chinese economy."
In the "decades ahead" you still expect the US to be capable of this? US military power and economic power, right now, is crumbling away in front of our eyes. The US will be lucky not to be sending diplomats to China in a vain attempt to buy food parcels in a decade or so.
Not a word about WHY coal is so important to China. Its high EROI vs oil and gas. 50:1 for coal. 20:1 for oil. 5:1 for natural gas. These are broad global averages so don't nitpick my numbers. The principle is sound. Absorb the principle.
No heat, no manufacturing.
Yes, B, we still use fossil fuels to power our economies and reduce metal ores and make organic chemicals. We will do so until they run out entirely, but along the way we will develop other technologies to do a lot of these things, even though they will cost more. We will also change our economies to suit, while starting to scale everything down. If the oligarchs continue to take most of the resources, eventually there will be revolutions or wars (these have started already). It will all happen in the midst of people like you and me telling them it can’t go on. If the race survives, then it will eventually adapt to the new ways, probably with massive upheavals. We will NOT make objective, rational decisions and mitigate the crash, especially on the national level. That’s just the way it is. And still, I’m optimistic that beauty will prevail, as it currently does. Thanks and enjoy!
Electric arc furnaces are only effective for refining steel if you also have something like Carbon or Hydrogen, Yielding CO2 or H2O, to strip away the Oxygen from the iron Oxide ore.
Arc furnaces are primarily used when recycling scrap metal that has already been refined once.
Lets end the myth of the coal-driven China as the posterchild for renewable (rebuildable) energy. The message has always been clear: renewable energy infrastructure is largely impossible without fossil energy and large-scale material extraction. Its installation is largely not replacing fossil energy use. Listen-up environmentalists.
As an environmentalist since 1970, you tar us with a false brush. It has ALWAYS been Reduce Energy Use.
Hello, not intended. There is a wide diversity of views. The recent trend I have seen is a movement away from Nature to solving global heating with renewables. This is leading to a lot of habitat destruction. Yes, use less energy, but that isn't highlighted in a lot of recent movements. I suspect we agree on a lot.
(Доверяй, но проверяй) “ it has always been Reduce Energy Use “. I have walked K street and No environmentalists , big money environmentalists, gave up on minimalism a long time ago.
The only thing that ever scared the machine was when we were happy to be dirt poor hippies. Tune in , turn on , and drop out. Minimalism , energy minimalism and accounting were easily killed by big money and modern NGO organisational goals.
Those who gave up on minimalism were never environmentalists in the first place. I can wear a Superman t-shirt, but that doesn't make me Superman.
Earth can't comfortably support all its people. I was always fascinated by Tierra del Fuego and its inhospitable remoteness. Now there's a town of 200.000 + and is a tourist attraction
"The windy conditions during the winter months can make it difficult for ships to navigate through the waters, and the choppy waves are often too strong for people to safely pass through. For that reason, plan your Tierra del Fuego adventure between the months of March through May, which is when the water is safe enough for ships to navigate.
The timing coincides with the scheduled departure times of our Antarctic Explorer: Discovering the 7th Continent Plus Cape Horn and Diego Ramirez adventure. This is a 13 day journey that will take you to the borders of the Lemaire Channel in Antarctica itself. Very few people can say they’ve visited one of the southernmost locations in the world, but you have that opportunity on this unforgettable voyage."
Let's go before it's too late!
Or better still, stay at home and concentrate on improving your mind (and even body). There's a lot to do in that respect for all of us.
This is something I've been wondering about as well. Though if the increasing prices of running fossil fuel power plants pushes most of them out of the grid, the available supplies of coal, oil and gas could extend by decades, in some optimistic cases centuries, which is fine by me.
Wouldn't be easy though...or fast, since one of the primary reasons for this lackluster transition is how cheap fossil fuels still are.
Disregarding any other obstacles for a moment: as long as continued operation of a coal power plant is cheaper than tearing it down, replacing it with renewables+storage and operating that, we will keep using the coal plant
I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s always important to remember the observation of Jevons. When you take into consideration, economic growth, alternative energies end up being an add to the overall industrial base. The repeated experiment is the cheap alternative produces economic expansion, and the thing it replaces continues to be utilized, although perhaps for different purposes.
That is important to keep in mind, but Jevons paradox, like most 'universal' truths stops being so clear-cut when it's applied to a broad concept like power generation.
What you said is 100% true, but only as long as the old stuff remains cheap and easily accessible too. The resource situation of the near and especially the far future is unprecedented.
Something else I want to mention here, because I don't see this being said often: The overly excited techno-optimist climate communicators have portrayed the global energy transition as something simple and quick, and I feel like this was a massive mistake.
It is a unique project, we've never done that before (only at most on country-scale), but even assuming such a global transition is possible it does not happen quickly or easily. It has phases.
Since our entire civilization was built on the fossil fuel platform, and we don't have the option of turning it off, there will inevitably be a time when the alternatives are just added to the grid and don't displace anything. I've never seen this as a failure, it's a necessity to keep everything running while the new stuff is being built. Since the economy is still growing, there will be increasing power demand too, which would swallow renewable deployment, as it did. The next phase would be when deployment outpaces growth, but that kind of speed needs to be incentivized either through the old stuff becoming expensive, or demand for fossil fuels exceeding the supply, and leaving the doors open for something else to take its place.
Since B already wrote lots of highly informative paragraphs about the various hurdles of manufacturing renewables, I'd rather not get lost in those details now. My point is that even if I just look at a realistic model of what a global energy transition would look like, this apparent adherence to Jevons paradox would inevitably happen, though it does not have to be permanent. In the real world it still could prove inescapable for us. I would however hesitate to apply this concept broadly in such an unprecedented situation as the present.
No argument there about the techno optimists. Since learning something of the resource exhaustion, I’ve drawn a considerable amount of anger on my head pointing out that swapping out energy sources is not going to be the panacea.
If climate base destruction doesn’t fragment, the global economy. The resource constraints definitely will. I am more optimistic about the world, traditional cultures all the “poor people” . They have an ability out of necessity to change their lifestyles and do something different while we don’t. Modernity is incredibly fragile in this way massive all consuming, but incredibly fragile.