Aluminium is used where there is not much movement and no requirements to space. Its cheaper, but breaks easily in comparison - and you need about twice the amount to conduct the same amperage.
Thank you for another reality check on resource limits. It is interesting how all these non-renewables are reaching peak simultaneously. Not entirely unexpected for anyone that read TLTG years ago. The unsettling part is the accuracy of the Club of Rome's report. Living in and around fishing communities and seeing the demise of commercial fishing over the last 30 0r so years it isn't a big shock. I believe it was stated to be around 2025 for the end of commercial fishing on the open seas. Well that seems about right, there are few fisheries left that can be considered viable. Most are now subsidized by .gov in one way or another. Even that won't be enough soon. Raw resource extraction will likely become nationalized just before it stops completely on a "supply the global market" side on the equation.
A dire situation, to be sure. In my locale homebuilders have to have a lot of security to keep the copper plumbing in a new build from being pilfered. But with the retirement of the penny, this may be a great opportunity for those who have a large collection of copper pennies that could be recycled. I know that the amount of copper in a penny is probably smaller than we might imagine, and there is probably some sort of federal prohibition of melting them down. Still the coins are of no practical value, and recycling them seems like a way to make them worth more than face value.
"A pre-1982 U.S. penny contains approximately 2.95 grams of copper, which is 95% of its total weight of 3.11 grams. This composition was used from 1962 to 1982, when the penny was made of bronze (95% copper, 5% tin and zinc). The current penny, issued since October 1982, is made of copper-plated zinc, containing only 2.5% copper by weight, or about 0.0625 grams of copper per penny. The weight of a pre-1982 penny is 3.11 grams, while the modern penny weighs 2.5 grams."
The old 95% copper pennies became worth more as metal continuously in 1982, hence the switch to copper plated zinc that year.
FYI, the 5¢ nickel has also been worth more for its metal content than its face value consistently since 2005... 25% nickel, 75% copper, they weigh 5 grams. A 5¢ coin worth about 18¢ in materials- they are going away soon too.
A much appreciated summation of the reality. Unfortunately it's obvious our direction promises an accelleration of resource depletion. Like the boomers who reveled in mechanical toys and advantages of comfort, current generations will revel in their AI playgrounds, until the existential threats its waste of resources inflicts strikes. How anyone can doubt that culling of massive numbers will occur, by depletion, neglect and yes, deliberately, having observed the still violent, psychopathically manipulated actions of those who control most other humans with those methods, is beyond me. And the more benign societal entities which have attempted to evolve, sad to say, will be similarly affected. It's really hard to argue with ecologist Lyle Lewis's (@lylelewis1) contention humanity was doomed from its origin, by its own capabilities.
My mantra is
"Find your allies, share resources of knowledge, tools and materials, and prioritize reduction of suffering the inevitable reductions and interruptions of existential necessities, as best you can."
Evolution is a random walk. What gives organisms immediate survival and reproductive advantage has no ability to foresee the long term consequences of these selection processes.
Politicians never look beyond the next election, with the exception of Xi in China and possibly Putin in Russia, so don't expect any long term planning or measures from them...And as Greg Cochran once said about endless supplies of oil, that would demonstrate that we are living in a simulation.....
American business plans for the next quarter. China plans for the next century. Resource wars are going to become increasingly common and brutal soon as the shortages become dire enough.
Peak oil, peak copper, peak food (are we there yet?); any other peaks?; peak human intelligence passed in the stone age; but peak death rates in other species and peak insanity in humans has not arrived yet.
I’ve seen figures before that show only ~3.5% of a population have the brain wiring to ‘get it’ - to see the overall picture, to think in systems rather than in polemics and emotions.
So no, there will be no peak mass collapse awareness never mind acceptance, until modernity is gone.
Peak awareness will come when the trucks stop rolling, the stores start emptying and the TV & internet starts going blank due to intermittent energy. Even then, they’ll look for someone to blame rather than look to overshoot.
I suspect what is happening here on Substack and over at YT is the mopping up and coalescing of that 3.5%.
Agree, and I wonder who they'll be blaming at the end. Pedophiles? Demons? Geo-engineers, for sure. You know that they are starting to blame doomers, right, for causing what they are only predicting?
I haven't seen the YouTube stuff much, as I am video-averse, but there's a sarcastic little cadre of collapse-aware types on Bluesky too. The climate statistician Eliot Jacobson is something of a hub for it.
Yes, I did see the doomer bashing by Mann and friends ahem. it just amuses me, that well educated individuals cannot see past their own specialist silos. All climate scientists should do a crash course in ecological overshoot, many of here have done that in amateur ways, so it's not hard.
As Tainter reminds us, this specialisation is in itself is a symptom of overshoot and societal collapse.
After they've gone through blaming scientists, jews, muslims, ethnic minorities, disabled, poor people, women there won't be anybody left to 'other'. You can be sure as long as electricity and the mainstream media exist, that balding fat white men in corporate suits in western capitals will be the last to be blamed.
I'm relying on the electricity and diesel becoming intermittent before they get round to blaming old gardeners like me.....
"I’ve seen figures before that show only ~3.5” of a population have the brain wiring to ‘get it’ - to see the overall picture, to think in systems rather than in polemics and emotions."
I would like to read research papers exploring this. It sounds like a Physiological explanation for the way people act the way that they do. William Reese discusses this. Apparently humans are hard wired to operate in the here and now. We do not think in large scale systems, which again makes sense because we are primates that engaged in hunter/gathering and lived in small nomadic bands. Not thinking in systems is an advantage. Now it will be our undoing. So much of the left and right do not engage in large scale top down analysis. The current systems as they are taken as a given that can and must be maintained at all costs.
Thank you for the tidbit, Mark. If you could please share any articles or links that would be appreciated. Your insights are always appreciated. Thank you.
I don't even know what the scientific term would be for those few that are capable of "getting it". I tend to call it joined up thinking, or the ability to see the bigger picture, which appears to be an ability I have. As an artist with a powerful imagination, it is something that is both a blessing and a curse.
It's anecdotal, somewhere in the Damn the Matrix blog back in 2018 I think it was, I recall it being referenced. The article at the time stated that someone else running a collapse blog, when he realised the sorta 3.5% figure, shut his blog down, because basically he was talking to the converted and there was little possibility of others embracing his awareness. It's one of them where I didn't keep a note, I'm sorry to say. I vaguely recall the figure somewhere again since, but damned if I can find either source now. Durr!
I do have a file of 43 pages of random links and article quotes that is 2.5MB size all overshoot/collapse related going back to 2018, how I'd get copies to people I'm not sure.
Regarding the Physiological (or is that pyschological?) responses to overshoot, see also the works of Dr Iain McGilchrist, who'se left brain-right brain analysis is fascinating. Although I don't agree with everything he concludes.
Another very interesting angle is Sheldon Solomon's fear of death theory:
As you say, people are generally wired for short-term self-interest, because it was an evolutionary driver for successful tribes. I don't know what internal chemical/biological or evolutionary traits would create a small percentage of people that 'see' outside the box.
It's not something I worry about particularly, but it helps you realise that you cannot bring ecological overshoot to people, they have to come to it. And those of blessed and cursed with this information, just be ready to help those through that do come to this place.
Yes. Peak food has been reached. We are in massive ecological overshoot which both the "left" and the "right" deny. Humans are living out physical reality through their personal fantasies. Physical reality is going to slap humans down hard.
What food we do produce is less nutritious due to increased CO2, and laden with micro-plastics and PFAS forever chemicals, but hey, so even if climate chaos didn't exist, we'd still go into collapse. Which of itself is no bad thing from a planetary perspective, but the real downer is all the other species we take down with us.
I notice data centers are building their own micro grids. I wonder if they are gonna outbid utilities for copper and energy, leaving everyone else to scrape by on what they can get.
The data center boom is an interesting bubble, because it is already over-leveraged, and debt financed to a point that if the current situation wasn't sustainable in itself (i.e., just the finance, ignore the issues with power, copper, etc...) then the plans for the near future are. It used to be a bad business model to build and opperate things that can't reliably pay for themselves within realistic revenue streems, but since the 90s, its what all the (temporarily) fastest growing and thus hottest companies have done.
The bursting of the associated debt bubble for the data centers might destroy a lot of them (and certainly abort armies of planned and speculated ones) even before high: energy, copper, etc... costs squeeze them to death longer term.
Another great essay, very much appreciated. Thanks for taking this deep dive. It's so important that industrial society gets over its collective delusion about "green" energy, and accept that growth is no longer possible, and that if we were smart we'd be downgrading now, before it's forced on us.
You might appreciate this piece I wrote last year, about environmental issues with copper mining:
I've been thinking about how we will need to adjust our living standards in all this. All the elaborate building codes will not be possible to comply with in a very short time frame. Something different will need to be built soon.
As per copper, I guess something we need to hope for is the failure of A.I. infrastructure build out, so that there will be at least some affordable communications tools available for the humans.
It's time to reinvent, or at least re-imagine, what an ideal living arrangement will be in the near future.
Building standards is an interesting case study. I'm almost certain that if you plotted the level building standard rigor and bureaucracy to energy use per capita there will be a near perfect correlation. You are correct that these things are the first things to go.
That is an interesting point. In Canada, we have become insanely top heavy with government and regulation. In no way will standards relax in order to make building anything less expensive.
The only way it happens, is ... total collapse of taxpayer contributions. Until then, it's probably not worth taking out a new mortgage. That said, I still kind of envy people who have no idea what peak copper or anything else really means.
There are two divergent macro trends happening around the world as you describe here. Our energy systems are becoming less productive on a unit material basis. Meanwhile material yield rates are dropping, requiring more energy to extract.
We could also overlay entropy in the form of societal complexity and bureaucracy. This is an increasing maintenance demand on the same energy system that is contending with material depletion. This all starts to paint a very grim picture of the future.
On the basis that debt is predicated on future growth. I think debt de-stabilization will be the first domino to fall which will cascade in ways we cannot predict, other than to say that the entire global financial system collapsing and taking our six-continent global supply chain with it.
So, I find this pretty compelling, but I looked into it and it seems like there’s news about things like inert anodes making aluminum production less carbon intensive at the process level. I understand that’s a tiny element of a bigger picture, but are inert anodes viable, or a nonstarter for other reasons than boosters will admit? I guess I ask because unfortunately, I feel like it’s incumbent on people arguing against the hegemonic faith in technology to save us to be prepared for all these little details. I know it’s exhausting, because someone who thinks comet mining will save us doesn’t have to understand anything and can just trust the people boosting it, but someone arguing against it has to know a lot about the physics and economics involved in actually doing that.
Combine finite resources with infinite political bullshit and you have an existential event. It’s the equivalent of death by a thousand cuts. The MIT ‘Limits’ team were all over this issue, but cutting back on consumption proved too hard to sell to voters. Of course, politicians don’t work for voters. They work for resource extracting capitalism, and here we all are, on the precipice of nothing good. Dana would be rolling in her grave.
A great article THS, but what impact it will have on those who need to know, or maybe do but wish to ignore it, I’ve no idea, I’ll just add Dr. Simon Michaux had been warning of this situation for at least 6 years to my knowledge, even written and had published a number of detailed reports, which appear to have had very little effect. So sorry to be ageist but, using my own experience (we) through ignorance or not, the Boomer and Generation ‘X’ have more than most been responsible for creating the predicament we’re in, just want to die with our present lifestyles intact, and sod the lifestyles when we’re gone of those planet eaters we spawned🤔
Another problem associated with copper is simply theft. As its price rises, it becomes increasingly profitable to steal copper wires or pipes, thereby destroying very expensive equipment and installations and disrupting transport, communication, electricity, and other networks.
All these installations, often located in remote but easily accessible areas, must be protected. This entails additional maintenance and operating costs.
For example, cables used to charge electric cars at charging stations are regularly stolen because they are fairly easy to cut and can contain about €10 worth of copper. But replacing one can cost around €1,500!
As our societies literally cannibalize themselves, we may soon find ourselves in a situation where it will no longer be affordable to keep a number of existing networks operational. Not to mention building new ones...
Tris, if you’re lucky you may miss the era of depleting flammable fossils and essential minerals, copper being one. Descending the Seneca cliff to a future 17th century feudal lifestyle will not be painless, few will survive the bottleneck of ecological overshoot, the great simplification, as global industrial civilisation collapses🤔
Sorry Tris, I do apologise, didn’t realise you were so looking forward to the collapse of global industrial civilisation with its civil unrest, chaos and bestiality as it fights to survive, and all whilst tumbling down a series of Seneca cliffs towards a 17th century feudal lifestyle🤔
The only possible solution from an elite perspective is a hard transition from control, which they've for all intensive purposes masters, to hard population reduction. I'd expect an increase in World Wide 'Green Zones' a la Iraq and then controlled or not so controlled demolition of non-essential (from their perspective) infrastruce. Just push harder on the coming food shortage, a sprinkling of leathal pathogens and contained water here and there and we're good to go 👌
Your feeling are hurts. Now wipe your tears and relax.
If you got an LLM to write your comment, it would make a lot more sense lol. Dont drink and post at the same time.
Now explain to me again how the wires HAVE TO BE COPPER lol.
They dont have to and they are not.
Aluminium is used where there is not much movement and no requirements to space. Its cheaper, but breaks easily in comparison - and you need about twice the amount to conduct the same amperage.
Thank you for another reality check on resource limits. It is interesting how all these non-renewables are reaching peak simultaneously. Not entirely unexpected for anyone that read TLTG years ago. The unsettling part is the accuracy of the Club of Rome's report. Living in and around fishing communities and seeing the demise of commercial fishing over the last 30 0r so years it isn't a big shock. I believe it was stated to be around 2025 for the end of commercial fishing on the open seas. Well that seems about right, there are few fisheries left that can be considered viable. Most are now subsidized by .gov in one way or another. Even that won't be enough soon. Raw resource extraction will likely become nationalized just before it stops completely on a "supply the global market" side on the equation.
Despite the many warnings we are going into this storm completely unprepared, and have done practically nothing to prevent the waves crashing over us.
Actually ... they are doing something .... they injected 6B+ humans with the Death Shots... and this will lead to https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
We should start with the highest consumers first!
Peak humanity is planned for when?
I think our owner have revised their projections, but do not want the projections, or the methods to be debated openly.
;-(
They are stockpiling for their own "breakaway civilization" projects now (I presume).
yes and finally on HN trending its time that we in the techspace realize this. we are writing about this topic for long time.
A dire situation, to be sure. In my locale homebuilders have to have a lot of security to keep the copper plumbing in a new build from being pilfered. But with the retirement of the penny, this may be a great opportunity for those who have a large collection of copper pennies that could be recycled. I know that the amount of copper in a penny is probably smaller than we might imagine, and there is probably some sort of federal prohibition of melting them down. Still the coins are of no practical value, and recycling them seems like a way to make them worth more than face value.
"A pre-1982 U.S. penny contains approximately 2.95 grams of copper, which is 95% of its total weight of 3.11 grams. This composition was used from 1962 to 1982, when the penny was made of bronze (95% copper, 5% tin and zinc). The current penny, issued since October 1982, is made of copper-plated zinc, containing only 2.5% copper by weight, or about 0.0625 grams of copper per penny. The weight of a pre-1982 penny is 3.11 grams, while the modern penny weighs 2.5 grams."
The old 95% copper pennies became worth more as metal continuously in 1982, hence the switch to copper plated zinc that year.
FYI, the 5¢ nickel has also been worth more for its metal content than its face value consistently since 2005... 25% nickel, 75% copper, they weigh 5 grams. A 5¢ coin worth about 18¢ in materials- they are going away soon too.
A much appreciated summation of the reality. Unfortunately it's obvious our direction promises an accelleration of resource depletion. Like the boomers who reveled in mechanical toys and advantages of comfort, current generations will revel in their AI playgrounds, until the existential threats its waste of resources inflicts strikes. How anyone can doubt that culling of massive numbers will occur, by depletion, neglect and yes, deliberately, having observed the still violent, psychopathically manipulated actions of those who control most other humans with those methods, is beyond me. And the more benign societal entities which have attempted to evolve, sad to say, will be similarly affected. It's really hard to argue with ecologist Lyle Lewis's (@lylelewis1) contention humanity was doomed from its origin, by its own capabilities.
My mantra is
"Find your allies, share resources of knowledge, tools and materials, and prioritize reduction of suffering the inevitable reductions and interruptions of existential necessities, as best you can."
Evolution is a random walk. What gives organisms immediate survival and reproductive advantage has no ability to foresee the long term consequences of these selection processes.
Politicians never look beyond the next election, with the exception of Xi in China and possibly Putin in Russia, so don't expect any long term planning or measures from them...And as Greg Cochran once said about endless supplies of oil, that would demonstrate that we are living in a simulation.....
American business plans for the next quarter. China plans for the next century. Resource wars are going to become increasingly common and brutal soon as the shortages become dire enough.
Peak oil, peak copper, peak food (are we there yet?); any other peaks?; peak human intelligence passed in the stone age; but peak death rates in other species and peak insanity in humans has not arrived yet.
Peak insanity is a good one. I wonder when exactly that will be. Will collapse awareness ever get to an acceptance phase?
I recall someone (possibly on NPR) saying around 2016 that they feared the world had recently passed "peak human rights."
I’ve seen figures before that show only ~3.5% of a population have the brain wiring to ‘get it’ - to see the overall picture, to think in systems rather than in polemics and emotions.
So no, there will be no peak mass collapse awareness never mind acceptance, until modernity is gone.
Peak awareness will come when the trucks stop rolling, the stores start emptying and the TV & internet starts going blank due to intermittent energy. Even then, they’ll look for someone to blame rather than look to overshoot.
I suspect what is happening here on Substack and over at YT is the mopping up and coalescing of that 3.5%.
Agree, and I wonder who they'll be blaming at the end. Pedophiles? Demons? Geo-engineers, for sure. You know that they are starting to blame doomers, right, for causing what they are only predicting?
I haven't seen the YouTube stuff much, as I am video-averse, but there's a sarcastic little cadre of collapse-aware types on Bluesky too. The climate statistician Eliot Jacobson is something of a hub for it.
Yes, I did see the doomer bashing by Mann and friends ahem. it just amuses me, that well educated individuals cannot see past their own specialist silos. All climate scientists should do a crash course in ecological overshoot, many of here have done that in amateur ways, so it's not hard.
As Tainter reminds us, this specialisation is in itself is a symptom of overshoot and societal collapse.
After they've gone through blaming scientists, jews, muslims, ethnic minorities, disabled, poor people, women there won't be anybody left to 'other'. You can be sure as long as electricity and the mainstream media exist, that balding fat white men in corporate suits in western capitals will be the last to be blamed.
I'm relying on the electricity and diesel becoming intermittent before they get round to blaming old gardeners like me.....
Could you extrapolate on this
"I’ve seen figures before that show only ~3.5” of a population have the brain wiring to ‘get it’ - to see the overall picture, to think in systems rather than in polemics and emotions."
I would like to read research papers exploring this. It sounds like a Physiological explanation for the way people act the way that they do. William Reese discusses this. Apparently humans are hard wired to operate in the here and now. We do not think in large scale systems, which again makes sense because we are primates that engaged in hunter/gathering and lived in small nomadic bands. Not thinking in systems is an advantage. Now it will be our undoing. So much of the left and right do not engage in large scale top down analysis. The current systems as they are taken as a given that can and must be maintained at all costs.
Thank you for the tidbit, Mark. If you could please share any articles or links that would be appreciated. Your insights are always appreciated. Thank you.
I meant 3.5% not 3.5" but anyways.
I don't even know what the scientific term would be for those few that are capable of "getting it". I tend to call it joined up thinking, or the ability to see the bigger picture, which appears to be an ability I have. As an artist with a powerful imagination, it is something that is both a blessing and a curse.
It's anecdotal, somewhere in the Damn the Matrix blog back in 2018 I think it was, I recall it being referenced. The article at the time stated that someone else running a collapse blog, when he realised the sorta 3.5% figure, shut his blog down, because basically he was talking to the converted and there was little possibility of others embracing his awareness. It's one of them where I didn't keep a note, I'm sorry to say. I vaguely recall the figure somewhere again since, but damned if I can find either source now. Durr!
I do have a file of 43 pages of random links and article quotes that is 2.5MB size all overshoot/collapse related going back to 2018, how I'd get copies to people I'm not sure.
Regarding the Physiological (or is that pyschological?) responses to overshoot, see also the works of Dr Iain McGilchrist, who'se left brain-right brain analysis is fascinating. Although I don't agree with everything he concludes.
Another very interesting angle is Sheldon Solomon's fear of death theory:
https://youtu.be/J-gjxwqoeYk?si=Uh7dmRgKNLlRwXWl
As you say, people are generally wired for short-term self-interest, because it was an evolutionary driver for successful tribes. I don't know what internal chemical/biological or evolutionary traits would create a small percentage of people that 'see' outside the box.
It's not something I worry about particularly, but it helps you realise that you cannot bring ecological overshoot to people, they have to come to it. And those of blessed and cursed with this information, just be ready to help those through that do come to this place.
Found this. Not exactly neuroscience but it may have been around the blogosphere.
https://multispective.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/only-3-of-general-population-are-systems-thinkers/
Wow, Jonathan, you're going to like this, talk about timing:
https://adrianlambert.substack.com/p/why-some-people-see-collapse-earlier?
https://energyskeptic.com/2025/have-we-reached-peak-food-sustainability-challenged-as-many-renewable-resources-max-out/
Yes. Peak food has been reached. We are in massive ecological overshoot which both the "left" and the "right" deny. Humans are living out physical reality through their personal fantasies. Physical reality is going to slap humans down hard.
Thanks for the link, adding it to the collection.
What food we do produce is less nutritious due to increased CO2, and laden with micro-plastics and PFAS forever chemicals, but hey, so even if climate chaos didn't exist, we'd still go into collapse. Which of itself is no bad thing from a planetary perspective, but the real downer is all the other species we take down with us.
I notice data centers are building their own micro grids. I wonder if they are gonna outbid utilities for copper and energy, leaving everyone else to scrape by on what they can get.
The data center boom is an interesting bubble, because it is already over-leveraged, and debt financed to a point that if the current situation wasn't sustainable in itself (i.e., just the finance, ignore the issues with power, copper, etc...) then the plans for the near future are. It used to be a bad business model to build and opperate things that can't reliably pay for themselves within realistic revenue streems, but since the 90s, its what all the (temporarily) fastest growing and thus hottest companies have done.
The bursting of the associated debt bubble for the data centers might destroy a lot of them (and certainly abort armies of planned and speculated ones) even before high: energy, copper, etc... costs squeeze them to death longer term.
Another great essay, very much appreciated. Thanks for taking this deep dive. It's so important that industrial society gets over its collective delusion about "green" energy, and accept that growth is no longer possible, and that if we were smart we'd be downgrading now, before it's forced on us.
You might appreciate this piece I wrote last year, about environmental issues with copper mining:
https://kollibri.substack.com/p/copper-mining-totally-not-green-but
I've been thinking about how we will need to adjust our living standards in all this. All the elaborate building codes will not be possible to comply with in a very short time frame. Something different will need to be built soon.
As per copper, I guess something we need to hope for is the failure of A.I. infrastructure build out, so that there will be at least some affordable communications tools available for the humans.
It's time to reinvent, or at least re-imagine, what an ideal living arrangement will be in the near future.
Building standards is an interesting case study. I'm almost certain that if you plotted the level building standard rigor and bureaucracy to energy use per capita there will be a near perfect correlation. You are correct that these things are the first things to go.
That is an interesting point. In Canada, we have become insanely top heavy with government and regulation. In no way will standards relax in order to make building anything less expensive.
The only way it happens, is ... total collapse of taxpayer contributions. Until then, it's probably not worth taking out a new mortgage. That said, I still kind of envy people who have no idea what peak copper or anything else really means.
Yes ignorance is bliss. The infinite growth narrative, although ridiculous, is reassuring.
Brilliant piece, thank you.
There are two divergent macro trends happening around the world as you describe here. Our energy systems are becoming less productive on a unit material basis. Meanwhile material yield rates are dropping, requiring more energy to extract.
We could also overlay entropy in the form of societal complexity and bureaucracy. This is an increasing maintenance demand on the same energy system that is contending with material depletion. This all starts to paint a very grim picture of the future.
On the basis that debt is predicated on future growth. I think debt de-stabilization will be the first domino to fall which will cascade in ways we cannot predict, other than to say that the entire global financial system collapsing and taking our six-continent global supply chain with it.
You're sounding like me! This is very much the Resource Entropy Singularity I've been writing about for the last 20 years.
I think you’ll appreciate this one then https://open.substack.com/pub/newzealandenergy/p/biophysical-realities?r=ubsbu&utm_medium=ios
I am writing about this as well, lets connect. weltaufgang.com is something we launched last week,
So, I find this pretty compelling, but I looked into it and it seems like there’s news about things like inert anodes making aluminum production less carbon intensive at the process level. I understand that’s a tiny element of a bigger picture, but are inert anodes viable, or a nonstarter for other reasons than boosters will admit? I guess I ask because unfortunately, I feel like it’s incumbent on people arguing against the hegemonic faith in technology to save us to be prepared for all these little details. I know it’s exhausting, because someone who thinks comet mining will save us doesn’t have to understand anything and can just trust the people boosting it, but someone arguing against it has to know a lot about the physics and economics involved in actually doing that.
Combine finite resources with infinite political bullshit and you have an existential event. It’s the equivalent of death by a thousand cuts. The MIT ‘Limits’ team were all over this issue, but cutting back on consumption proved too hard to sell to voters. Of course, politicians don’t work for voters. They work for resource extracting capitalism, and here we all are, on the precipice of nothing good. Dana would be rolling in her grave.
Excellent post…
A great article THS, but what impact it will have on those who need to know, or maybe do but wish to ignore it, I’ve no idea, I’ll just add Dr. Simon Michaux had been warning of this situation for at least 6 years to my knowledge, even written and had published a number of detailed reports, which appear to have had very little effect. So sorry to be ageist but, using my own experience (we) through ignorance or not, the Boomer and Generation ‘X’ have more than most been responsible for creating the predicament we’re in, just want to die with our present lifestyles intact, and sod the lifestyles when we’re gone of those planet eaters we spawned🤔
Another problem associated with copper is simply theft. As its price rises, it becomes increasingly profitable to steal copper wires or pipes, thereby destroying very expensive equipment and installations and disrupting transport, communication, electricity, and other networks.
All these installations, often located in remote but easily accessible areas, must be protected. This entails additional maintenance and operating costs.
For example, cables used to charge electric cars at charging stations are regularly stolen because they are fairly easy to cut and can contain about €10 worth of copper. But replacing one can cost around €1,500!
As our societies literally cannibalize themselves, we may soon find ourselves in a situation where it will no longer be affordable to keep a number of existing networks operational. Not to mention building new ones...
Tris, if you’re lucky you may miss the era of depleting flammable fossils and essential minerals, copper being one. Descending the Seneca cliff to a future 17th century feudal lifestyle will not be painless, few will survive the bottleneck of ecological overshoot, the great simplification, as global industrial civilisation collapses🤔
What do you mean 'lucky' ? I might die before that ? Because I'm definitely not rich enough to fly to Mars 😁
Sorry Tris, I do apologise, didn’t realise you were so looking forward to the collapse of global industrial civilisation with its civil unrest, chaos and bestiality as it fights to survive, and all whilst tumbling down a series of Seneca cliffs towards a 17th century feudal lifestyle🤔
Fair enough. I'm not in a hurry 😉
👍Neither am I. In the meantime at every opportunity visit the great outdoors and enjoy what nature provides for free, whilst you still can🤔
The only possible solution from an elite perspective is a hard transition from control, which they've for all intensive purposes masters, to hard population reduction. I'd expect an increase in World Wide 'Green Zones' a la Iraq and then controlled or not so controlled demolition of non-essential (from their perspective) infrastruce. Just push harder on the coming food shortage, a sprinkling of leathal pathogens and contained water here and there and we're good to go 👌
"all intents and purposes"