Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXLV
Non-Renewable, Renewable Energy-Harvesting Technologies (NRREHTs): For and Against…Again
The ongoing ‘controversy’ regarding the pros and cons of ‘renewables’ is one I doubt will ever be ‘settled’. As with most things, there exist positive and negative attributes to this technology with one’s perspective on them varying widely as will be shown in the following discussion from the Peak Oil Facebook Group I am a member.
The following meme prompted the conversation that follows:
SP, a fierce supporter of NRREHTs responded to the picture as follows (my comment and our ‘debate’ comes afterwards):
Most of the items in the second category are recyclable at the end of life. Coal is not.
Me:
A lot of the material we use is theoretically recyclable. But theoretical ideals about recycling have never been met. Never. And then there’s the Law of Entropy.
SP:
fuck it. Let’s just mine coal instead till we cook to death?
Me:
Yes, that’s exactly what those who point out the problems with ‘renewables’ have been arguing for.
SP:
most of the things on that list are EV/battery/wind farm components. The recycling rate on those items is at around 85%. Already today.
MC:
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” — Benjamin Brewster You either mine the coal or use any variety of other FF to mine the others for the one and only time we will have the energy to build out this technological work around, that by the time we’re done, we won’t be able to do anything else with. Thanks fossil fuel era. It was great.
Me:
Without even delving into the tremendous amount of energy/resources required to recycle ‘renewable’ minerals, here are some pertinent facts:
Most lithium-ion batteries end up in landfills — they are not recycled; in fact, the current estimate of lithium recycling is about 1%.
Regardless of advances in cobalt recycling, shortages due to supply constraints are projected to be critical in the near future, and, in theoretical models, only 15% of demand could be met by recycling.
Close to 20% of nickel ends up in landfills and about 14% remains in carbon and stainless steel.
Recycled copper only accounts for about 1/3 of current U.S. production demands, and this has been decreasing in volume.
Manganese recycling is limited with efficiency estimated to be 53%, actual recycling about 37%, and almost twice as much lost during attempted recovery as is actually recycled.
Theoretical ideals are one thing, reality is something quite different.
SP:
I’m familiar. The very overwhelming majority of lithium ion batteries have not yet hit end of life. You have to actually have volumes of batteries available to start recycling them. That’s coming, and as you see in the article all the processes and systems are being established to do it effectively. For now, much of what hits end of life is in ewaste, things like the disposable vape pens and such, and they cause lots of fires at solid waste facilities when they are disposed incorrectly. Things like EV batteries will go through totally different existing waste management systems that are already very effective at catching things like lead acid car batteries. The recycling rate for vehicles as a whole is already 85%+.
LN:
Both create surface disturbances, but only one of those is literally cooking us all to death in real-time.
SP:
Me:
And a not insignificant amount of fossil fuels are required in the processes needed to produce (and recycle) non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies. BOTH are contributing to an exacerbation of our overshoot predicament.
LN:
using fossil fuels for mining would be an eff of a lot better than using them for EVERYTHING.
and YES… OF COURSE… global heating is not our only problem (which is a synonym for “predicament,” btw) or the only cause of severe ecological overshoot — we have to cut back on EVERYTHING — but if we don’t mitigate global heating, nothing else will matter.
SP:
Except we dont need to use it for mining. That’s just something the doomers here insist on repeating because they want it to be true.
Me:
LN, Yes, we need to cut back on everything including mining and industrial production of technology. And nothing will matter if we don’t do this and it is increasingly looking as if we will not. Theoretical ideals aside non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies are NOT mitigating fossil fuel extraction and use, they are adding to it; as well as adding to sink overloading of other types and wiping out ecological systems as we speak. There is NOTHING positive about chasing yet another technology.
I closed my part in the post’s conversation with this comment, the part in bold perhaps being the most important aspect:
Just happened across this passage from Catton’s Overshoot:
“Nature is going to require reduction of human dominance over the world ecosystem. The changes this will entail are so revolutionary that we will be almost overwhelmingly tempted instead to prolong and augment our dominance at all costs. And, as we shall see, the costs will be prodigious. We are likely to do many things that will make a bad situation worse. It is hoped that the kind of enlightenment offered in this book may help curtail such tendencies.”
Given the ‘profiteering’ that has become the impetus for the (significantly misleading) ‘green/clean’ energy narrative it seems inevitable that we are destined to dig the hole deeper for ourselves and do exactly what Catton feared.
Chasing ‘renewables’ with our quickly diminishing fossil fuels is in that realm of making a bad situation worse. And in making a horrible situation worse, we are guaranteeing a ‘collapse’ of epic proportions.
I maintain that, in an ideal world, our remaining energy leveraging would be focused on safely decommissioning the dangerous complexities we have scattered about the planet and helping communities relocalise important ‘survival’ needs so that there is a chance for some to get through the bottleneck we’ve created for ourselves. The mass denial of reality, and belief in human ingenuity and the all-powerful god of technology is guaranteeing we will not do this.
To which EM replied:
Isn’t it strange how so many people are blind to overshoot and can’t see that technology use causes it? Despite this information being available for the last 40+ years, it is rather depressing that it is constantly ignored as if it doesn’t apply to them.
For those that have followed my writing, the following is a link to a downloadable PDF file compilation of my first 25 essays. I have put this together to serve as a test for the distribution of a writing project, It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1, that attempts to provide an ‘overview of/introduction to/update on’ the variety of issues that encompass the nexus of limits to growth, ecological overshoot, and energy, and that should be available in the next week or two.
While offering a single document with some my essays, the aim is to be able to determine the number of ‘views’ to the page that provides the link and serve as a proxy for the number of downloads of the document and thereby get a sense of the ‘success’ of the writing project and whether a second volume might be a worthwhile pursuit.
Click on the following link to access the document as a PDF file, free to download: Today’s 1–25
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers). Encouraging others to read my work is also much appreciated.