Those who keep complaining that wind turbines do not work when the winds are not blowing, just realized that oil does not work when the Hormuz Strait is not open.

@randahl

Or the oil refineries and fields are on fire or destroyed

@noondlyt @randahl
Interesting.
When wind does not blow, you still have solar power.
When sun is not shining you still have wind power.
Only when there is no sun and no wind, then you have no power.
If the strait of Hormuz is closed, you have no power.
If the refineries are on fire you have no power.
If Hormuz is closed and refineries are on fire you have even less power.
🤔
@gunstick @noondlyt @randahl I would like to suggest one correction: When there is no sun and no wind, you have batteries.

@randahl I saw someone yesterday say that solar and wind are just as “vulnerable” because so much of it is also shipped through the narrow straits of Malacca(?)…. Ignoring, or ignorant, of the fact that because the energy for renewables actually comes from the sun, only new or replacement solar/wind capacity would potentially be disrupted by this kind of shut down….

The sun would still shine and the wind would still blow, the rivers, magma, and tides would still flow, all no matter how many wars some idiot starts.

@chris @randahl

Like saying the Iran war will cause a shortage of jerrycans...

Its amazing to me how many people confuse the energy with the generator.

@chris @randahl Also ignoring there's an entire ocean of alternatives to the Straits of Malacca - somewhat longer, but quite viable, unlike the Persian Gulf with only one way out.
@chris @randahl My thoughts are with those photon tanker crews. Godspeed, heroes. Hope that strait opens soon. I need my EV gas!!!

@chris @randahl

Oil and natural gas provide feed stocks for much more than just diesel and petrol.

sour crude extracted in the region is a primary source of sulfur. sulfur is a feed stock for sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is a chemical that’s used to extract and refine copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. Oil is an input to a lot of products.

Natural gas and sulfur are also feed stocks for fertilizer.

The global supply chain is the risk

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @chris @randahl Exactly why it is so stupid to burn oil.

@pvollebr @chris @randahl

Well, yes, no. It is stupid to burn a resource like this, but the stupidity comes from building an economy in this case of global supply chain that exists by eating the planet. It’s built on destroying some other part of the world for the benefit of a tiny few people.

The other way to look at it is that it is a particular choice of economic pathway which temporarily can benefit people, but it is designed to consume the planet and people

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @chris @randahl We are of the same opinion.If humankind and all other life is seen as having a worth. You think twice (times 1000) about ruining it.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Sulphur can be mined from geological deposits, it is a naturally occurring element. Taking it from oil is a choice.
Similar for fertilizer. Can be taken from natural products if we just do more on (re)use. But no, being wasteful is still cheaper in the short run.
@chris @randahl

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @randahl yes. “Non energy use” of oil is about 15% of the total 100 million barrels a day. It’s 12% of NG use. But the reason it is a global tool of blackmail and war is the other 85% which can be replaced by renewables and different ways of doing things.

Let’s stay focused on the main problem here. Which is the burning of fossil fuels.

@chris @randahl

If you don’t have feed stocks, eg sulfur or methane, you don’t have the global economy.

alternatives cost a lot more. After 20 or so iterations, 90% recycling you’re down to 10% of that resource.

We burn fossil fuels in order to destroy the planet. Swapping to renewables is still destroying the planet.

The different way of doing things is to re-localize economies and stop destroying the planet with a global economy

@chris @GhostOnTheHalfShell @randahl
This is not how renewable/recyclable resources work. Killing off half the planet's population to 'go back' is a non-starter.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

You are engaged in exactly the thing I keep disputing with people. Because you are embracing the fallacy that the options offered to you and I by the global economy are the only options.

If we consider choosing to develop options that don’t rely on them, it is “going back to living in caves”.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

So you would be arguing or are arguing in essence cities like Amsterdam or Paris or even Seoul Korea that converted a freeway corridor into a walkable river area and park had to kill off half their population in order to “go back”.

You know the people who argue that? Big oil and big car.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @chris @randahl
...You're not going to replace global trade and feed the world by creating walkable cities.

Walkable cities reduce oil and car use and massively increase living quality so yes more but it's not at all going to remove global trade. Or stop our need for recycling/renewables.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

I would not have suggested such. The point of reload colonizing farming is that it actually brings more food to table per acre. There’s research behind this. The other reason reason to do this is organic nutrient recycling.

A warmer environment will destroy global trade and communities restore their local food autonomy, especially those nations where their own food autonomy was deliberately dismantled by the WTO/etc in order to “open their economies”.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

People have to get their heads around the idea that the global economy is unfit for purpose in a warmer world that large scale and long-term investments will be destroyed by extreme weather.

Bio regionalism as it is called necessity, but also to disconnect from the system that’s burning the planet down. And if you want to blindly accept with big agriculture has been telling people for a few decades now which has repudiated, that’s your prerogative.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

But Southeast Asia has recognized that the green revolution is not sustainable. Nations like Indonesia, India, and others have realized that they need to have alternatives to industrial agriculture. They’ve already faced several deep crisis because of the war in Ukraine. They already realized that their own food security demands that they find different solution solutions.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

Lastly, a localized economy requires recycling. That is the requirement to be sustainable within a bio region.

As far as renewables go, you have to understand that they destroy the planet because of the resources, the iron, the concrete, the copper, the nickel, the lithium, the aluminum, and even the resources for silicon wafer, are extremely lethal, toxic resource extraction processes, and they have to grow exponentially

@Crissa @chris @randahl

So in order to build out an energy replacement for today’s economy, we would have to destroy the planet to do so.

And apparently people are perfectly happy to murder, indigenous populations, destroy entire forest and lead behind a toxic lethal pool that will poison the water supply for generations, on the premise that once everything is built once all this destruction has taken place. It’ll be recyclable.

@Crissa @chris @randahl

In other words, let’s obliterate the third world in order to keep today’s consumption in lifestyle the same. This is not a morally tangible stance.

In addition, if you achieve 90% recycling rate for let’s just say aluminum or any other material after 23 iterations you’re down to 10% of that resource.

All the buildout taking place now for solar/wind will need to be replaced in 20 to 25 years so sure you can recycle some things if it’s cheaper than killing the planet

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Okay, for the gish-galloper who did in fact post that we needed to end global trade:
- "Reload colonizing farming" is gibberish.
- "Warmer environment will destroy global trade and communities restore their local food autonomy," is not a complete compound sentence, it's unsupported gibberish.
- "Bio regionalism as it is called necessity, but also to disconnect from the system that’s burning the planet down." Also gibberish; the subject does not follow to the implied subject of the second fragment.
- You post at https://masto.ai/@GhostOnTheHalfShell/116222247334429174 disagrees with your post at https://masto.ai/@GhostOnTheHalfShell/116230457262556314 and no, we can recover 95+% of minerals from batteries and 98% of aluminum. 75% of aluminum ever mined is still in use!
- You keep repeating this nonsensical claim that recycling doesn't work 'because then you're down to 10%'
- If it's cheaper to grow wheat in another country and rice in another, global trade benefits both parties. It also invests such nations to avoid war (like what Russia or the US is doing) because war destroys their trade-dependent economies.
GhostOnTheHalfShell (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] If you don’t have feed stocks, eg sulfur or methane, you don’t have the global economy. alternatives cost a lot more. After 20 or so iterations, 90% recycling you’re down to 10% of that resource. We burn fossil fuels in order to destroy the planet. Swapping to renewables is still destroying the planet. The different way of doing things is to re-localize economies and stop destroying the planet with a global economy

Mastodon

@Crissa

I am simply listing an inventory of facts.

If you don’t have the high school math to understand compounded loss, then I understand your confusion. If you only recover 95% of a material. Repeated recycling rounds will diminish on each cycle until there’s hardly anything left.

You cannot assume that the recovery rate for lead from lead acid batteries (90+) is similar to recovery rates for other raw materials extracted from other technology.

..

@Crissa

Asia and southeast Asia are acutely aware and sensitive to issues of food security, but you were saying about global trade it’s something that they have reevaluated because they have been at the sharp pointy stick of global trade disruptions.

You are repeating the orthodox economic position on trade which has been debunked. For instance, force sacrifice their own food, autonomy have found out the hard way that they end up stuck in debt.

@Crissa

In short, they have to continue to butcher their own natural resources and impoverished themselves in order to purchase food on the global market when they used to be able to feed themselves.

Countries throughout Southeast Asia realize this. India, in particular understands that the green Revolution all those extremely expensive inputs and seeds are unsustainable. I know this because CNA, the public broadcaster of Singapore interviews officials in India, discussing this very topic.

@Crissa

If you want to call what government officials from nations of India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Cambodia, say two news reporters gibberish or Gallup that is your prerogative, and there is little house to discuss.

The topic of resilience against supply chain disruption is now one of regional concern, even within the United States.

Those counties that prepared for supply chain disruptions for other reasons weathered better economically during Covid shutdowns.

@Crissa

“Reload colonizing farming” is a transcription error from voice to text.

That should’ve read “localized farming”. There are times where Apple transcription the voice to text does a very bad job and I don’t catch the mistakes for that. I apologize.

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
A list of 'facts' would require them be facts, and not just mangled english. A gish-gallop is something you could have looked up. 'Reload colonizing farming' is not. And yes, a gish-gallop is when someone tries snowing in via many posts or arguments at once.

If you want anyone to pay attention to your message:
- Be brief.
- Don't use complicated jargon.
- Make sure not to have errors.
- Fix errors when they occur.

For instance, it takes 22 iterations of 90% to get below 10%. A modern lithium battery could go thousands of cycles before being recycled, and with just the technology we have now, that means they last ten to twenty years... twenty-two times that would be hundreds of years!

@Crissa

I know what a gallop is, and I know of the names of quite a few logical fallacies.

Reload colonizing farming was a mist transcription because I use voice to text and I did not catch it.

Because there is a 500 character limit, and the nature of the topic would easily feel two pages I added multiple posts.

@Crissa

As a counter example to one of your complaints, you say 75% of all aluminum that’s ever been mind is still in use. Aluminum mining exploded around the year 2000.. in other words aluminum extraction has exploded in the last 20 years.

My chief point is the cheapest stuff is the energy we never dig up or have to burn.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/History-of-aluminium-production-in-the-world-since-1950-http-wwwalueuropeeu-2012_fig1_281456810

@Crissa

What you were not considering is the magnitude of the buildout to a new energy system, solar and wind battery systems whether or not they rely on lithium because they’re all sorts of new technologies under development, is that to build out to the capacity we are talking about, requires destroying the natural world to get at it. The companies that extract mineral resources like Rio Tinto are just as bad as big oil and big tobacco.

@Crissa

Client the consequence of a warmer climate disrupting global trade is a very active topic. Again I need to apologize because the transcription service doesn’t work perfectly and I don’t catch it’s

But what I had meant to say is that it is necessary for communities to restore their food autonomy, which means that nations restore their ability to feed themselves. The rules of global trade have forced many nations to surrender their food autonomy.

Yeah, we don't need to end global trade because it's cheaper to grow rice and wheat locally. It's not cheaper at all. We need to end global trade, because you do rely on ruinous extraction, and you never ever, ever, ever do anything that benefits both parties. You can't stop doing that, because you can't police the whole world. Even the people "on your side" can go off and commit atrocities in your name, and you'll remain blissfully ignorant.

In other words, if it's cheaper to grow wheat in one country and rice in another, you still don't establish global trade, because someone is going to get shafted. If it's not you, then you're the shafter, and once you run out of victims, your rosy worldview comes crashing down.

At the very least, global trade should be a rare and isolated thing, only for when we absolutely cannot meet our needs locally. It cannot be 100% of our economic transactions, the way it is today. That is utterly mad.

CC: @[email protected]

@cy

Well, my own attitude about trade is that regional trade makes a whole lot of sense as a form of mutual aid in resilience to ride over any failures in one particular area.

Humanity has engaged in long distance trade into prehistory. The nature of the goods exchange though has of course greatly changed.

To your point, yes “trade” has often been tribute.

But every community should be reasonably self-sufficient = living within planetary bounds.

@cy

I think a major hurdle most people have is that they don’t have a mental model that human ingenuity and creativity combined with all the material science and consolidated knowledge. We now have a have available, means that so much more can be done regionally that hadn’t been available in the past.

We have f-in 3D printers that are crazy dependent on fossil fuels, but it's still wild as fuck what we can do now.
@chris @randahl and if #trump controls #StraitOfHormuz you have to pay for energy whatever he deserves.

@randahl if only we had ways to produce energy that don't rely on oil.

If only...

@tootbrute @randahl

That's just crazy. Why, you would need some sort of super fusion reactor safely placed about 90 million miles away for that.

Oh.

@pseudonym @tootbrute @randahl No, no, that wouldn't work. You'd have to do wireless power transmission. You'd only get a tiny, tiny fraction of the produced power. Completely impractical.

@sharif @pseudonym @tootbrute @randahl

What if … we gave eleventy bazillion dollars to Elon, to launch 42 million X-link satellites to completely enclose the reactor and capture all the radiated energy ? 🤔

@isol @pseudonym @tootbrute @randahl Sounds like a roll of the dice, unless they're AI-controlled.
@randahl @jachym That is, of course, nonsense and a lie. Cars continue to drive, planes continue to fly, plastics continue to be produced...and donkeys continue to bray.
@Zoufalec @randahl @jachym Is that why the EU and the US have begun using their emergency reserves, because it’s not an emergency?

@randahl

https://ourworldindata.org/2024-living-planet-index

And long after most of us are drowned from CO2 pollution the winds will still be blowing.

Life -> CO2 Sequestering -> Amazing and Beautiful Life and Diversity -> Industrial Revolution -> Human Growth -> Greed -> Scrabbling Control -> Planetary Corrections

The 2024 Living Planet Index reports a 73% average decline in wildlife populations — what’s changed since the last report?

A guide to understanding the Living Planet Index and what it does and doesn’t mean.

Our World in Data

@randahl

What if... we plugged the turbines into the wall? They'd turn all the time then.

That's my VC pitch, please leave your briefcases of cash at my feet and any gold bars can go in my Honda.

@randahl ... but wind keeps coming back, Trump hopefully not.

@randahl To be fair, wind turbines doesn't work when the winds are blowing too hard either.

They need "goldilocks-winds" 🙂

@martenbjorklund @randahl
I assume they're engineered to work within the middle hump of the distribution of windspeeds? You could probably make one that worked in a hurricane, and made a tremendous amount of power, but the economics don't favour one that would be doing nothing 11 months in the year.

@martenbjorklund
To be extra fair, current turbines have cut-off speeds right in the middle of Beaufort 10 (and turbines for hurricane-areas can go higher).
So between that and 3-4m/s as cut-in speed for large turbines, Goldilocks doesn't seem too picky here ;)

@randahl