Too much post-modern marxist magic in magma
Silly title but serious subject.
As James Howard Kunstler explained in Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation non-polluting, sustainable energy is much more difficult to achieve than enthusiasts claim. The same point is made by physicist Vaclav Smils in How The World Works.
The problem is that fossil fuels are irreplaceably involved in our entire industrial establishment. Creating a completely non-fossil fueled technology is a long ways away, if even attainable. Then there is fossil fuel as feed stock for chemical manufacture. Maybe some plastics, dyes, pharmaceutical compounds, and fabrics can be made from alfalfa, but mostly it takes the hydrocarbons cooked up in the earth to turn out these products.
Post-modern gender activists have, by rhetorical sleights of hand, done away with deviance. 98% of the population is now labeled "cis-gender" (cis boom bah) and the oddball 2% is the non-binary new 'they'. "Sustainable" is the same sort of sleight of hand: recycling makes plastic sustainable; organic crops are sustainable; meat grown in vats (brains in vats, anyone?) makes meat sustainable,
Except it has not, does not, and will not.
So there is this pool of magma just waiting to be turned into immaculate electricity by nonbinary engineers. It takes a lot of steel to drill into the hot magma, never mind transfer heat to steam and turbines. How does all these steel get made? Fossil fuels, iron ore, etc--all obtained with more steel and fossil fuels. The heat extraction equipment producing the immaculate electricity won't last forever -- 30 or 40 years, and then will need to be replaced. More fossil fuels.
Oh, but we'll use hydrogen for everything, or electricity.
A lot of copper wire, steel, and other metals and chemicals will be needed to make all this work. How do we get more copper? From huge mines, gouging out mountains worth of low-content ore. People don't like big mines or the metal extraction process. Polymet wants to mine copper and nickel in northern Minnesota. It's low grade ore, but it's mostly what's available. In 99 out of 100 metal extraction facilities, local water resources are badly polluted. This mine stands to ruin actually wild wild rice growing on Indian reservations, pollute waters in a state and national park, and eventually pollute Lake Superior.
The pont is: sustainable pollution free energy is a fantasy.
I deeply wish this were not so, but it is. Feel free to comment on other post-modern fantasies that you know of.
As James Howard Kunstler explained in Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation non-polluting, sustainable energy is much more difficult to achieve than enthusiasts claim. The same point is made by physicist Vaclav Smils in How The World Works.
The problem is that fossil fuels are irreplaceably involved in our entire industrial establishment. Creating a completely non-fossil fueled technology is a long ways away, if even attainable. Then there is fossil fuel as feed stock for chemical manufacture. Maybe some plastics, dyes, pharmaceutical compounds, and fabrics can be made from alfalfa, but mostly it takes the hydrocarbons cooked up in the earth to turn out these products.
Post-modern gender activists have, by rhetorical sleights of hand, done away with deviance. 98% of the population is now labeled "cis-gender" (cis boom bah) and the oddball 2% is the non-binary new 'they'. "Sustainable" is the same sort of sleight of hand: recycling makes plastic sustainable; organic crops are sustainable; meat grown in vats (brains in vats, anyone?) makes meat sustainable,
Except it has not, does not, and will not.
So there is this pool of magma just waiting to be turned into immaculate electricity by nonbinary engineers. It takes a lot of steel to drill into the hot magma, never mind transfer heat to steam and turbines. How does all these steel get made? Fossil fuels, iron ore, etc--all obtained with more steel and fossil fuels. The heat extraction equipment producing the immaculate electricity won't last forever -- 30 or 40 years, and then will need to be replaced. More fossil fuels.
Oh, but we'll use hydrogen for everything, or electricity.
A lot of copper wire, steel, and other metals and chemicals will be needed to make all this work. How do we get more copper? From huge mines, gouging out mountains worth of low-content ore. People don't like big mines or the metal extraction process. Polymet wants to mine copper and nickel in northern Minnesota. It's low grade ore, but it's mostly what's available. In 99 out of 100 metal extraction facilities, local water resources are badly polluted. This mine stands to ruin actually wild wild rice growing on Indian reservations, pollute waters in a state and national park, and eventually pollute Lake Superior.
The pont is: sustainable pollution free energy is a fantasy.
I deeply wish this were not so, but it is. Feel free to comment on other post-modern fantasies that you know of.
Comments (170)
Quoting Bitter Crank
My only gripe is with the title of the OP. There is a tendency to lump together Marxism and postmodernism. They are not the same. In fact, postmodern philosophy was formed in part in opposition to Marxism, contrary to what people like Jordan Peterson claim.
How, exactly?
Quoting Jackson
Marxism relies on an emancipatory meta-narrative (dialectical materialism). Postmodern deconstructs all grand meta-narratives , like the narrative of progress or thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
:up:
A term by Fichte, not Hegel.
Lyotard said that. Not sure who belongs to the postmodern school.
The idea of post-modern is first (to my knowledge) found in Hegel. Who often talks about the next period after the modern.
Depends who you ask. Postmodern philosophy is different from postmodern literature , architecture, etc. I would put Nietzsche, Rorty, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida , Heidegger and Butler in the category of pomo philosophy.
Okay, that is fair.
If you look at a cross section of the Earth, the crust is extremely thin. Just a dusty skin around what is otherwise a huge nuclear reaction. It wouldn't seem very hard to imagine taking advantage of that nuclear reaction and using it to power everything we want on the surface.
It is difficult to get recycling perfect, but that doesn't mean it is impractical. For example, most of the lead in car batteries is recycled these days. Making new batteries out of old batteries. Does that mean we no longer need to mine new lead? No. But imagine how much more desperate the situation would be if we had to pull each new car battery out of the earth. The aim is to slow down significantly; even if we can't come to a complete stop yet.
There are also things like bioplastics that serve as an alternative to petroleum products.
I think it's too late to claim that renewables are impractical. We have already made enough success to show that it is beyond plausible. And even if renewables were a fantasy, are you arguing that should just hurry up and use all the finite resources? Are we in a rush to destroy ourselves? Wouldn't we still want to slow down our demise as much as possible?
I remember the original discussion of this technology. It's true the original poster got a lot of skepticism, including from me, but I don't remember it being particularly harsh. He basically said that the fact that we don't drop everything else and put all our money into a potentially promising but untested new technology was a sign of stupidity or corruption. It seemed to offend him that we didn't all agree with him immediately. His obsessive and browbeating style was similar to Karl Stone's.
Planning is the critical piece missing from the recycling process. Manufacturers must plan for the products entire lifespan. Don't make cars, refrigerators, or computers out of material that can not be recycled. Plan for their eventual retrieval and reprocessing. Don't make trillions of single use objects without establishing the means for their collection and reprocessing (water bottles, paper envelopes, or diapers). Individual efforts are part of the solution, but without industrial planning, we will get what we have got: a large percentage of readily recyclable materials being wasted / lost, and a lot of non-recyclable materials accumulating -- somewhere.
I'm not a chemist, but I understand that some plastics can be made from biomatter. But plastics come in a huge range of molecular structures with all sorts of extreme performance characteristics. Can you make Teflon out of ore oil?
I'm an old man, and I like plastic, just like everybody else does. Great stuff. But people lived full, meaningful, interesting lives before plastic. For instance, people used to keep food in their refrigerators in glass containers. Worked fine, until you dropped it. Very few people died as a result.
NO! We should definitely stop producing, consuming, and disposing of stuff the way we do. It's just that when you look around, there are megatons of stuff that are not going to get recycled.
Quoting Bird-Up
Never mind lead; what about lithium, indium, lanthanum, cerium, cobalt, neodymium, samarium, europium, terbium, and dysprosium? Rare earths are critical for 'green' energy and related applications. It isn't that rare earths are necessarily rare. It's just that they don't usually appear in concentrations that make them easy to obtain.
Thanks, I would agree with everything you said. But isn't there also a valuable continuum of progress between adequate-solution and inadequate-solution?
If you are making the point that people are overestimating their ability to manage resources; I would also agree to that. It's more about feeling like we have a solution than actually having a solution. Maybe that is a sort of crude coping mechanism for dealing with the intimidation of the situation we find ourselves in: make a little progress, deny reality. Make a little more progress the next day, deny reality again. It's hard to acknowledge the scope of the situation without getting frustrated.
For as long as I've been alive, people have said that conservation and non-fossil energy will never replace fossil fuels. Batteries will never be efficient enough to allow widespread use of electric cars. Obviously, many of those people have vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. Then along comes Elon Musk and says "fuck that" and changes the energy landscape in a decade.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying we've never really tried. It's been an uphill battle against financial and regional political interests. Republicans will lie about climate change the same way they have lied about the 2020 election. They'd rather drive the world off a cliff than admit there is a cliff we should avoid driving off.
Judging from our past successes, I'd bet on our future success. I have no idea what 150 years from today will look like, but I imagine it'll be as different as it was 150 years ago. Whether that will be harnessing the power of magma, the sun, hydrogen, the ebb and flow of the tides, or the spinning of the planets, who knows?
As to magma specifically, or any particular solution, such is not a philosophical question, but entirely empirical, and I'd be completely uninterested in anyone's thoughts other than an actual scientist with actual data and some evidence based proof. I remain skeptical of magma not because I think it's impossible, but because it's not been shown doable in a large scale way.
Plus, the problem isn't technology per se; as the saying goes a bad workman blames his tools - there's no point in buying or inventing new tools so long as human nature doesn't change (take away a psychopath's gun and s/he'll still kill...with a knife probably).
Off topic? :snicker:
Smils is a physicist, now retired from the University of Manitoba, and doesn't come down hard on either side of the global warming debate. Rather he shows what is physically possible, what is physically unlikely, and what can not work at all. He's an exceptionally clear writer, very accessible.
"[It is] reassuring to read an author so impervious to rhetorical fashion and so eager to champion uncertainty. . . Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility — the rarest earth metal of all. His most valuable declarations concern the impossibility of acting with perfect foresight. Living with uncertainty, after all, “remains the essence of the human condition.” Even under the most optimistic scenario, the future will not resemble the past. "—The New York Times"
The idea of slowing down production and consumption sounds good, until we consider the severe consequences awaiting. Slamming the brakes on production/consumption will bring about a world-wide depression of great severity. The world's economy simply can not turn on a dime.
There are many ideas like yours which directly address the problem (say, let's all live like it was 1890). The problem is that radical shifts in production / consumption will cause the sort of horrendous catastrophe in the short term that global warming will produce in the slightly longer term,
What does this mean? I think it means we're screwed. It's like this: if you are in the way of an oncoming disaster -- flood, forest fire, category 6 hurricane, a dozen tornadoes, poisonous toads falling from the sky-- whatever, it's too late to do anything about it. You must either flee or perish, maybe perish even I you do flee.
Of course we should keep working diligently towards solutions, but keeping it in mind somewhere between our ears, that there is no magic solution where everything turns out just perfectly.
Yep, it appears we've been asleep at the wheel. Someone, there were nearly 4 billion of us on the planet back when we could've taken some preventive steps (1800s - 1900s), should have seen this coming and raised the alarm.
People are still optimistic though. "We still have time to act!" is a refrain I've heard more often than I could care to count. Well, like this person once said to his toddler "we can do this the easy way or the hard way."
In 1960 the world population was 3 billion. At that time, there was, already, some concern about CO2 among expert circles, and there was concern about population. Yes, we could have done more 60 years ago, assuming that the 3 billion free-agent humans were willing to forego what they thought was material progress, what they thought was the right thing to do.
We are not good at planning for long-term consequences. Young people tend not to think usefully about what it will be like when they are old, even though old age is only a few decades away. Once they are around 50, old age becomes a more cogent concern. People alive in 2022 can not usually think very usefully about 2050 or 2060, never mind 2100. It's too distant. 2030 is close enough to worry about,
Were we skilled at predicting and planning for events 50 to 100 years out, we would conduct our collective affairs differently. But we are not.
Scope Insensitivity
[quote=Wikipedia]Scope insensitivity influences how bad people consider the extinction of the human race to be. For example, when people are motivated to donate money to altruistic causes, the quantity they are willing to give does not increase linearly with the magnitude of the issue: people are roughly as willing to prevent the deaths of 200,000 or 2,000 birds.[28] Similarly, people are often more concerned about threats to individuals than to larger groups.[/quote]
The time scales involved are too large for people to fully grasp the magnitude of problems like global warming which has taken roughly 2 centuries to manifest in the small ways it does today.
Someone should try and put our predicament into perspective, like how astronomers did in cosmology (re Cosmic Calendar & Geologic Calendar)
[quote=Wikipedia]A variation of this analogy instead compresses Earth's 4.6 billion year-old history into a single day: While the Earth still forms at midnight, and the present day is also represented by midnight, the first life on Earth would appear at 4:00 am, dinosaurs would appear at 10:00 pm, the first flowers 10:30 pm, the first primates 11:30 pm, and modern humans would not appear until the last two seconds of 11:59 pm.[/quote]
I'd say we're a fraction of a second away from disaster!
We have time! Pffft! :snicker:
C+O2-> CO2 + energy
is fully reversible by
CO2 - energy = C+ O2.
Whining stopped. (Whinging in American.)
Recycling will be an archaic form of reusing by altering.
Nore whining stopped.
Eventually (in a few billions of trillion years) all this will be stopped due to heat entropy, but hey.
So, drill baby drill.
We won't have to wait for a flat-out frosted cosmos to (paradoxical phrased) cook our goose. Long before the last erg of heat is given up, the sun will have expanded to envelop the earth within itself. The planet will survive as a cinder.
Long before the sun fries us, it is likely, under the best of circumstances, that we will have run our evolutionary course into the ground.
Long before we have run ourselves into oblivion, we may have spoiled the earth to a degree that we will have all died off.
Not to leave a disasteroid crashing into earth off the list.
Aha! The rest of your agruments are solid. This (quoted one) we can avoid by smarts.
Geothermal energy! :up:
We could offload some of our energy production onto Earth's natural heat! That would be great for the ecology but bad for the economy (of OPEC countries). How powerful is the OPEC lobby, internationally? Could they, have they, blocked/forestalled efforts/research into green/clean energy? Or are they using all that oil money to wean us off fossil fuel?
Has anyone done a scientific analysis of the exact problem with batteries? Why are they so big, heavy, and short-lived? Batteries are obese! :snicker:
I'm not in the battery business, and I'm neither a physicist o chemist. My guess is that a lot of midnight oil is being burned on the problem. It just seems to be very difficult to corral electrons and stuff them into boxes. Then there are problems with heat, chemical stability of the storage media over the long run, not to mention cost $$$.
Still, if you compare a run of the mill D cell with the battery in your cell phone... there was some real progress. Maybe there is an undiscovered exotic molecule out there that will absorb and release electric energy really really well.
Still, if you compare a run of the mill D cell with the battery in your cell phone... there was some real progress. Maybe there is an undiscovered exotic molecule out there that will absorb and release electric energy really really well.[/quote]
:up: IE we're waiting for a breakthrough in battery tech. The transformation that would cause would be dramatic and the person/persons involved would be given Nobels for sure.
By the way, nice way of looking at the science of electricity - simple and to the point! We need more people like you!
Sure, all that.
But we can do better than we are doing.
What else do we do?
I think you are correct about hydrocarbons. "Oil" is such an useful resource, so it likely we cannot go without it. What we can only do is try to do away with burning it as a fuel. And of course, an equilibrium is found always. Be that with the market mechanism, at least partly successful central planning or an mix of the two, or then with calamity, crisis and famine. If a population of a species gets far too big for the resources to sustain it, nature has an apt way of handling these issues. Has happened quite many times.
Yet unlike other species, we can anticipate what we do to our environment. So likely we'll handle this episode somehow. Not with flying colors, but still.
In a way since we live nearly in a post-religious society where many aren't so-called religious, we have a place to fill in our needs. The ecological doom has taken the role of the 'end times' being near and us having the necessity to repent our sins and our sinful way of life.
Like moths to a flame!
Hey, everyone has to die at some point, somehow, so who cares if a few billions die of hunger, floods, etc., right.
What are you responding to?
At least the people who do the dying stuff.
Congratulations. You are the first person to post this Latin phrase.
A dubious distinction I'd say; after all I am talking about poisons! :snicker:
Si persistere stultum in sua stultitia, sapiens fieret
Quomodo stultus pertinax sapiens efficitur?
The thing is, deviance is not a thing. It is not something you whisk away with a sleight of hand. Deviance is a stance, and something inherently non-objective masquerading as objective. It is not magical thinking to challenge `the concept of deviance, the psuedo objectivity of the category of deviance is itself the magical thinking. A reification, a slight of hand which brings something phantasmal into a fictitious reality.
Whereas, the non-feasibility of renewable energy is a problem as real and objective as it gets. This is *the* problem of our age, and I will not concede it's non feasibility until all the greatest minds of our time are fully engaged with it, and admit defeat. The germane problem, as of now, is why they are not.
I don't think it is the non-feasibility of renewable energy per se, which is being challenged by Smil, but the impossibility of replacing the whole entrenched infrastructure based on fossil fuels rapidly enough to achieve the projected reductions of emissions.
It also seems that the only option we have is to try; which should at least have the effect of improving our situation, if not totally ameliorating it. The point is that the problem should be approached with an eye to realism, not to fantasy; as the latter mindset will probably lead to rapid disappointment and ensuing despair.
I understand, that's what I meant. And it may not be possible even with endless time.
Quoting Janus
The thing is, we are already at the despair. And so we don't try, out of fear of disappointment. Far far easier to simply suppress the awareness, after all, there is still time...
If magical thinking is ever needed, it is needed now.
Quoting hypericin
What if magical thinking leads us to waste time and resources on projects doomed to failure, whereas a realistic, pragmatic attitude might lead us to acknowledge it is now inevitable that it will be bad, but that it can be less bad if we make the right changes?
Which projects? The ones mentioned in the op are precisely the kind of changes we need to make things less bad. But they aren't perfect solutions, there will always be pollution and carbon emission, So according to the OP they are not worth pursuing? Is that magical thinking, and an excuse for inaction? Outcomes are not binary. It is possible we can still collectively live relativly well for 10 more years, or for 50, depending on our choices now.
Only if it can be shown that they are really, when all things are taken into account, greener than fossil fuels. Otherwise they are projects doomed to failure, and perhaps destined to make things worse, not better than they otherwise would have been. The problem is there seems to be no impartial, that is free of politicization, investigation, research and discussion of options.
Also I don't agree that we are already "at the despair". You may be: I think promoting magical thinking might be a symptom.
Capturing tidal energy is possible, but claiming that it will be a significant source of energy requires a bit of hocus locus, because (as far as I know) tidal energy research is in an early stage. Announcing that in 40 years, everyone will use public transit sounds like a good idea, but it is just more magic if one can not explain how that happy event is going to be brought about.
Fusion is another piece of magical thinking, The magic isn't in the fusion; the magic is in the prediction that it will work, will work well, and will be on line within a few years.
The most magical piece of thinking is that without coal and oil, we will go on our merry way, living as we have been living--plastics and all--just using different sources of energy.
In his "world made by hand" novels, Kunstler illustrates what life would be like after an abrupt break with our energy past. Life goes on, but it is far more difficult. Whether the break is abrupt or more gradual, we should stop thinking about doing things like magically replacing 1 billion gas powered cars with 1 billion electrical cars. (There are about 1 bn cars on the world's roads now,).
Quod bonum est, laetus sum. :grin:
:100:
The Tragedy of the Commons: Anything that's public won't last long - expect decline in the quality of the service as time passes. Plus any motor vehicle accident, by default, is going to be a mass casualty. The government will go bankrupt from getting sued for injuries and deaths of commuters; after all owning private vehicles is prohibited by (a silly) law...to save the planet. :snicker:
:snicker:
How about this idea? We construct a big kite and fly it high above the earth's atmosphere to collect energy from the solar wind, just like Ben Franklin is said to have done with lightening.
I think the biggest problem is that there are too many human beings on the earth. Cultures of living creatures who thrive tend to keep expanding until they wallow in their on waste where it inevitably extinguishes them. Human beings might think that they are special, but they're not. A few may escape or something might evolve to adapt to the polluted environment. One being's waste is another's nutrition.
The only thing different between animals and humans is that the latter can alter their perspective on life but the former can't.
The 'magic' isn't in the basic technology. There's no 'magic' in the physics and chemistry of using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons. The 'magic' lies in the human part of the equation, in supposing that the truly massive investment in fossil fuels can or will be switched to an equally massive investment in hydrogen or geothermal (magma) in a relatively short period of time. Oil companies have sunk petawads of money in drilling holes in the ocean to suck up toxic sludge; it takes a lot of magic to suppose that the whole fossil fuel industry and its millions of investors and billions of consumers can or will switch to anything else in the near future.
My reading of the global warming situation is that time will run out before we can make sufficient adaptation (like using hydrogen, reducing population, sequestering CO2, etc.). "Time running out" means that the heat gains will begin to unravel the economic fabric of the world's economies. Without robust economies, we're pretty much dead in the water.
Major industrial or technological changes take time to implement, usually 40 years, +/-. In the 75 years since it's arrival, nuclear fission has has not been fully implemented. The infrastructure for ever higher volume data transmission through the Internet is still being implemented, never mind fully developed. Computers, in all their various and sundry forms are still being developed and integrated, and that's around 75 years.
If it takes 50-60 years to implement hydrogen, along with geothermal, we are out to 2070-80, by which time the chickens of global warming will be home and roosting. There is absolutely no guarantee that we will convert to hydrogen. Supposing that we will have done so is where the magic comes in.
Demographers have said the 2100 population will be around 11 billion. Gaining 3 billion people, coping (or not coping) with at least a 2ºC global temperature rise, and the consequent increasing competition for food, water, and livable environment looks to me more like an end game than anything else.
Look, I hope we get our collective acts together to solve our various big problems. It just doesn't seem like we are going to be successful or quick enough.
:ok:
The question is how does this scale up fast enough to replace fossil fuels before climate spirals out of control?
Geothermal is good for what, not even 0.5% of world energy generation at this moment? Do we even have enough engineering and building capacity to build what we need in any reasonable timeframe?
Pointing to a theoretical possibility means nothing if it isn't practically feasible. The practical details are exactly what matter here. We do need to do the math in this debate, otherwise it is magical thinking.
Similar exercises have been done with solar, wind and nuclear, and ridicules amounts of facilities need to build to be carbon free by 2050, and those are technologies that don't need any R&D anymore, and we could implement everywhere right away.
Bitter Crank, and authors like Vaclav Smil, are absolutely right to be sceptical about these kinds of proposals, if one looks at the numbers.
Raise the standard of living and the people having so many children will rapidly diminish.
And the interesting fact: Japan hasn't had an economic crash or societal collapse. So a World with a diminishing global population might not be so bad after all.
That was a good read, Bitter Crank. Thanks.
Or, is it that we think we can alter our perspective on life, when we really cannot. In that case, the difference might be that we're the only animals capable of self-deception.
What magma energy mining does is puncturing the crust. Can you imagine what happens, apart from taking energy? Dante's peak?
Well yes, assuming financial, human and material resources are finite... we do have to make choices between what kind of things we will prioritize.
If it turns out geothermal doesn't get there in time, and the earth overheats, and societies collapse because climate change stresses get to much, then investments into geothermal, and mitigation in general, maybe could be better spend (at least for some part) on adapting to climate change instead.
If the whole thing goes south we presumably would have little use for high-technology energy sources.
Every country has to come up with a plan to scale down use of fossil fuels and retain energy security at the same time. There's were the agency is at for the energy-transition (and that will probably not change any time soon), and also the bottlenecks for political will, budget and resources.... To make that plan they need to figure out their equation about cost, security and pollution of different energy-sources.
From what I gathered geothermal seems to make a lot of sense if you're close to continental plate fault lines. For other locations you need to drill a lot deeper, figure out how you get hot water out without causing seismic activity etc... I assume there's a reason it's still in a development-fase in a lot of countries where hot water doesn't literally gush out of the ground like in Iceland.
So the reasons for some countries not making it a priority would be costs of building the plants, research cost and time, and security issues etc... It might make more sense to build nuclear plants for instance. But look I'm no specialist and one does have to look at the numbers, case by case probably.
I know there's a lot of heat under the earths crust, just not how easy it is to be turned into usable energy. NASA's estimates are theoretical I presume? How practical is it to tap into it, what is the technology and engineering needed to do this? And especially, how much does it cost? There's always a cost to extract the energy, if possible at all. That's what is needed in this debated, you can't just say magma energy solves all the problems and expect everybody to take your word on it.
:snicker:
Our inaction speaks to our despair. We face an existential threat the likes of which humanity has never experienced, and we avert our gaze. What is this, if not despair?
It would be great if we could confront the problem rationally. But how do we get there? I don't think we can, there is too much magical thinking already. The magical thinking we require is, "we can succeed, if only we give it absolutely everything". This may involve trying everything feasible, even the doomed solutions.
But I agree, it is certainly best to avoid solutions which likely make the problem worse, like perhaps biofuel. My take though of the op was that it was "magical thinking" to pursue mere partial solutions. On the contrary, we need all the partial solutions we can think of.
Complacency. A sense of powerlessness; an inability to unite with others in effective coordinated action.
Quoting hypericin
I don't see it that way. In my view, we should think that we may be able to make things better if we are willing to sacrifice a good deal of our comfort and accustomed lifestyles. The problem is that only a small proportion of the population cares enough to educate themselves about the issues. Most people are all about the sound bites and virtue signalling.
I will say, even if we assume energy to be nigh unlimited and free of carbon, that doesn't mean we have reached sustainability. Energy and climate change is what is focused on most of the time, but that's only one of the major issues we are dealing with at the moment. There are also other, material and bio-physical limits we run into now, and if not now, eventually.... More energy let's us kick the can a bit further ahead of us, but at some point we will have deal with it. I tend to agree that we need more energy right now, because the alternative isn't very appealing (to understate how dire things could get), but I wouldn't presume we solved everything with that.
It is, like I thought, 'theoretical' though, in that its aim was to only research scientific feasibility. There's still a big gap between showing something to work in a research project and unlocking the technology on a large scale in an existing energy market. Costs for instance typically are no factor in a science project, because the are subsidized and economic feasibility is not the aim of the research.
Quoting karl stone
This is not entirely right. Raw resources like all kinds of metals, are not created, save in rather rare events like supernovae or the big bangs. We have to do with what has been given us on earth for the most part.
Energy is a factor in the sense that you need energy for mining, and thus more energy lets you mine more. But this isn't free by no means. It"s typically a highly ecologically damaging activity, and not only because of burning fossil fuels, but mainly because of destroyed ecosystems.
The density of needed resources is diminishing over the years. We used to find copper in big lumps scattered across the land, now it's typically only a small percentage of the mined rock. This has been fine because mining technology coupled with dirt cheap fossil fuels let us grind through tons of material at relative little financial cost... but at the cost of larger and larger areas being mined.
So 'limitless energy' only get's you so far, if we assume we have limitless energy to begin with, which i would doubt. To begin with there's no such thing as limitless energy in physics, and even though theoretically the heat of the earth would be limitless for our intents and purposes, I highly doubt that we can turn that into limitless usable energy. The same thing can be said about solar energy, theoretically more energy than we could ever use, shines on the earth every day, for a couple of billion years still. But in practice it turns out photovoltaic cells can only turn a small percentage of that into electricity, we need to much of certain materials to build the panels and the batteries to scale them up, they wear off over time, you end up with a lot waste etc etc...
Nothing is free, to make energy usable for us you need to build all kinds of facilities and machinery, which makes that you run into all kinds of practical limits if you want to scale it up. For magma-geothermal we, I guess, don't know what the real costs are because it hasn't been deployed on a large enough scale. And that is by itself already a big issue because we need to decarbonise right now ideally. We have little time to put our hope in future technologies.
Quoting karl stone
Carbon is hardly the only thing that matters. There are definitely limits, it's just not clear where they exactly lie. Waste heat of continued increase in energy use alone would fry the earth eventually.... But anyway, I do agree with the sentiment that we should give future generations a decent shot by finding the best way to generate energy.
I think (here not used to indicate an instance of thinking, but to voice some amount of uncertainty or subjectivity in what I'm about to say) that what I did was in fact thinking in this case.
That tentative conclusion that you might be talking about a 'merely' theoretical study, came as an answer to the question in my mind: 'why isn't magma-geothermal being used everywhere by now, if it was shown to be that good by NASA?'.
My priors going in were something like (not exhaustive)
1) NASA does seem like a trustworthy organisation,
2) I don't think Karl Stone is straight up lying,
3) Magma-geothermal isn't being used on a large scale anywhere
4) There are a lot of studies being made (in case of renewables for instance) that don't take into account full costs and availability of human and material resources when talking about replacing fossil fuels, i.e. they are theoretical in that they don't take into account real world constraints
Running that question through my mind, I thus came up with an explanation that violated my priors the least/fit into my view of the world the best. I did look at some of those priors, but didn't find anything that would make me want to reconsider them. And then you shared the link to the study, which only confirms my tentative conclusion that is was only theoretical. As a kind of Bayesian, that is what I think thinking is.
"Theoretical" is in no way meant to be dismissive by the way, just that it doesn't look at real world implementation yet. It is part of the process, and a vital step in coming up with new technologies... you have to start somewhere.
Anyway I stand by my original position, that we can't sensibility talk about the viability of this in relation to other energy-sources, if we don't have data about the costs and other practical stuff. Maybe it could work at scale, I just don't know.
I did consider that possibility, and I kinda figured you would bring that up as a possible answer to that question, which is why I added "not exhaustive" afterwards... I won't deny that political and industrial interests probably play a role in choosing what energy sources to go with, I just don't think in this particular instance that would be the most important reason why it wasn't adopted. Sure, vested interests will push for more financing in their particular sector, but lobbying only gets you so far. If it was such a clearly abundant and cost-efficient energy-source, politicians wouldn't be able to steer political decision processes in other directions... not in an issue with so much public attention. The simpler explanation in my mind is that there are in fact some technical, technological or practical issues that hamper implementation everywhere on a large enough scale.
In order to maintain the relatively high standard of living for some people, many other people have to live a relatively low standard. So that's not really a solution.
In Japan, living a modest, minimalist lifestyle is a virtue. Not everyone there lives that way, but some do. And if too many did, that would bring problems for the economy eventually.
Plain living and high thinking not only is no more, it seems it isn't the solution some hope it would be either.
Why?
Prosperity isn't fixed. It's not a game of someone wins, others loose.
For example, take all the Americans of 2022. Compare them with all the Americans of 1822.
How will you argue that compared to two hundred years ago, only some Americans have become more prosperous, but others have it worse than in 1822.
It is a solution.
The real question is how to get there.
But here's another perspective. Scientists do have an interest in making their particular field attractive for investments. Most research projects rely on government funding to keep on existing and the succes of a researchers more or less gets measured in how much funding they can secure for their projects.... So that's another narrative one could create around the data we have.
What sways me however is that it isn't being used on a large scale anywhere in the world right now, eventhough energy security is such an important issue. It's not only about the US and NASA. I'm not an American, and I know that they are researching deep geothermal in my country, but it's always only at very specific locations to see if it's even viable there. Never is it seen merely as a question of implementing a technology that we know will work anywhere. You'd think that if it was such a no-brainer, they would've come to that conclusion, a good 40 years after NASA already did.
:up:
The creation of prosperity (or wealth) is really not like the law of conservation of energy. Yet the false idea persists. Basically it's the consequences of Marxism: that the capitalist just takes something from the worker, hence the capitalist just steals from the worker and thus we would be better of without the capitalist in the first place. Yet the fact is that without the innovations, without the enterprises or the ideas of arranging a service, the potential capitalist would do something else and the workers does something else. Perhaps they'd be all working in the fields trying desperately to grow enough crops as the society was before the industrial (and agricultural) revolutions.
And magma energy is a perfect example of this: a basically untapped energy resource (perhaps now only used in some way in places with highly volcanic activity). If we could harness efficiently and cost-effectively, it would create more prosperity for us. It wouldn't be something "stolen from the poor". It would need the technology, the investment, the enterprise effort and simply the competition with other energy resources to make it the optimal energy resource.
Yet this simple fact will hardly have any impact to some. Too many people are mesmerized with ideas that improvements happen only by basically stealing from others, that capitalism and the market mechanism are bad, because there are obvious problems and injustices around us. Hence throw everything out...at least at a theoretical level. Yet central planning and socialism without market mechanism hasn't worked. But who cares about history?
The limits to growth fanaticism doesn't come from marxism I'd say, but more from some religious inspired eco-romantic back to nature notion couple maybe with some neo-Malthusianism, i.e the garden of Eden, i.e. the tower of Babel, i.e. Akira... there's tons of old and modern myths about it. It's the idea that reliance on knowledge and technology will do us in ultimately (human hubris) and that we need to return to some previous more pure natural state to save us all.
Also Marx was all for industrialization, It was the reason the bourgeois historically could have taken over from nobility, which ultimately paved the way for the proletariat to take over. It's a question of distribution and who controls the means of production for Marxists, wealth and prosperity an sich are fine. Not so for back to nature-guy.
That's a good point.
In a way all of these are criticisms of our present, either romantic or ideological, more things that some just say and not true alternatives.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Marxism wanted to replace the market mechanism with central planning. In a way, it is a belief in the human intelligence and our technocratic ability to plan. Yet the fact is that we cannot plan what the next technological (or scientific) breakthrough will be. And we cannot assume to know what technology will be the most cost-effective, productive decades from now.
The romantic "nature guy" opposition is even more ideological or should I say religious. Perhaps the 21st Century person knows this idea from the Avenger -films bad guy Thanos, who came to the conclusion that there are too many lives for the resources the universe has. The idea of course is ridiculous and as depicted on the movie, quite evil. And so is the bizarre ideas of the neo-Luddites. The Luddite argument can be easily shown not to be true as the industrial revolution didn't bring us hoards of beggars roaming the countryside as there would be no work. Also the idea that because of technology, people won't find work is also strange. Yes, we can indeed work less, but that isn't the same that there would be an idle class perhaps at best engaging in a dialogue on a Philosophy Forum. (Even if active here, I do work also.)
At the end, perhaps it's just that optimism just seems so naive and pessimism seems for us so realistic.
As opposed to what? There's no default position on how the world ought to be from which a concept of 'back-to-nature' might be an ideological deviation. Your own personal preference for how the world ought to be is ideological to no lesser a degree.
One may well dislike modern technology. It's not just a given that we must maintain as high a population of humans as it's possible to achieve. We each argue for the world to be the way we think it best.
By all means criticise the arguments (technology=no work, for example), but arguing that they are ideologically driven is impotent; all arguments are.
I like nature guy, I'm nature guy to some extent, but we can't return to some previous more innocent state of being without facing the consequences that entails. Back-to-nature should own up to the consequences, and in a world of 7, 8 billion people those aren't pretty I'd say.
I agree. The point I was making was that absolutely every single solution to that problem will be ideologically driven. If we want to feed the 7 billion with high tech solutions - that's an ideological commitment to technology. If we want to use the most low tech solutions possible and bring the population down as fast as we can - that too is an ideological commitment. If we believe that more 'natural' methods of agriculture can be high yielding enough to feed everyone - that too is an ideological commitment (after all, it's not as if the high tech methods exist yet, so why can't we equally imagine future low-tech methods being discovered).
What I object to is the glossing of status-quo based solutions with the veneer of pragmatism as an attempt to paint them as more 'grown up' a solution, to paint all others as ideological, but the present state of affairs as being somehow more down-to-earth.
We are where we are because of an ideological commitment to the principles of governance and economics which guide our decisions. We needn't be.
And those consequences aren't usually then thought through. Because the idea goes that we simply are consuming too much, hence let's consume dramatically less. The problem with this is that we need that scientific and technological improvements, because otherwise we are truly prisoners of our present carbon based energy production ...or society in general. A huge economic depression will surely our planet greener (as we saw during the Covid lockdown), but it will also cease any desire to make investments and will cause political crises. The idea that we could just put then investments could be put towards R&D (by central planning) simply doesn't understand how complex the world is.
The best way forward is typically something which reeks to a political compromise and which leaves many very disappointed on the outcome. And likely something that only historians will later see as important breakthroughs.
No, they don't. Not in Washington, nor in most capitols.
It isn't that they are so much opposed to geo-thermal as they are opposed to risking their economies, as currently operated. This is not a mistaken danger. A sudden switch away from fossil fuels to any other system could not be done overnight, and the transition is more likely to be wrenching and wrecking rather than smooth and pleasant--whether the destination is geothermal, hydrogen, photovoltaic, wind, or hydro.
Yes, global warming is going to be maximally wrenching and wrecking, so much so that we (collectively, everybody) are well advised to take the risks involved in dramatic change, now.
Relatively few major decisions about economies are made by governments. Most economic decisions in the capitalist sphere are made by investors (the stock markets), corporate boards, private capital, investment banks, very rich individuals, and the like. The Federal Reserve (in the US) makes big decisions, but the Fed is only a quasi-government organization. It's mostly a creature of the banking industry with a mandate to maintain liquidity and keep inflation around 2% and the official unemployment rate as low as possible.
So, millions of large investors vote semi-second by semi-second on all sorts of economic questions. One question they have voted on is whether to invest in geothermal power. Again and again, big money has shied away from that -- and other -- unfamiliar or risky kinds of projects. In most places, nuclear power has gotten a cold shoulder from investors as a result of 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
Investors are a nervous lot -- bent on buying low, selling high, and maximizing profits. Nervous and a bit fickle. They live their lives with at least one eye on the market's ticker tape. They are mostly risk averse.
"Hey, everyone. Invest in International Magmatron! We'll drill into mostly quiet volcanos in the Pacific Northwest and power up Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. It's your can't-lose opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this futuristic thermorama."
Investors read the prospectus and got clammy hands, hyperventilated, and required medical attention.
In the meantime, there is the big multi-trillion dollar petrochemical industry that is in place, predictable, and cranking out billions of dollars in profits. Well, sure... it's wrecking the planet, but it IS very profitable, and everybody likes profits. The planet might die in a century but our Dynamo Energy Fund could go broke in 15 minutes, if we're not careful. We just hate going broke!
S0, Karl, that's how decisions about magma energy, and many other worthwhile projects are made. It's not nice, I hate it, but that is, unfortunately, the way the system works.
Capitalism, as Karl Marx pointed out, is chock full of contradictions.
You don't have to be a Marxist to see that. Humans, with rare exceptions, are the very model of modern, major, contradictions. Cue Gilbert and Sullivan.
Groups of "lawmakers, scientists, protest groups, businesses and individuals" have disparate interests, within the group and between the groups. Not just one or two disparate interests, but numerous disparate interests.
That's why preserving the plant's ecosystem is only partly a technical problem. It's largely a human behavior problem, and an obstacle that human behavior has so far not been very successful at solving,
I beg to differ. I've written dumber things.
Yes, the government does do some R&D investment. Out of the US Federal budget of 2.3 Trillion Dollars, 106 Million Dollars was allocated to the Geothermal Office. What they do, actually, I don't know. Clearly Congress is not excited about geothermal. They devoted 250 Million Dollars to nuclear energy, not a huge vote of confidence either.
The members of the House and Senate also live their lives with one eye on the markets, and the other eye on on Bureau of Labor statistics, Treasury reports, Government Budget Office reports, and polling survey results. The thought of millions of redundant workers in the petrochemical sector or a collapse of the trillions of dollars petrochemical industry horrifies them, as well it should.
One of the points of which I have been trying to convince you is that a transformation of the energy sector (particularly concerning fossil fuels) cannot occur without severe dislocations in the world economy. Economic dislocation, collapse, destruction, etc. isn't merely inconvenient -- it will be fatal to a lot of people whose livelihoods disappear.
Supposing that we can just switch from a trillion dollar fossil fuel system to geo and hydrogen is a non-starter. It can be done, but it will take time--not a couple of years, not even a couple of decades. more like 50 years to get it all put together.
Your ideas are good, but they are not improved by monomania.
What I have been laying out is an explanation for why the rest of the world hasn't gotten their act together and started working on it. People do not do a lot of things they should and could do, whether that is giving up tobacco, exercising more, avoiding war, or demanding magma wells NOW.
Quoting Agent Smith
Quoting karl stone
Agent Smith was not rejecting geothermal; he was offering a suggestion as to why it hadn't happened.
There might be an argument against geothermal, but I am neither a geologist nor a heat transfer engineer. I haven't, and I can't offer any technical objection.
If you need testimony to that effect, I'd be happy to help.
It is as good as a rhetorical question, and it depends on various factors. You know that.
Read enough history and sociology and you will see patterns in how decisions get made.
Stupid, idiotic proposals are made and actions taken that defy human reason. As H. L. Mencken said (allegedly) "No one ever went broke underestimating human intelligence."
I can sort of understand why you think I've been dodging your question about "how do I know that". OK: I'm speculating. But it's speculation based on experience about how decisions get made. There is a lot of human thinking and behavior that is just not very rational. People in groups have even more problems making decisions rationally. Then there are the problems of implementation--another can of worms.
Samuel Johnson said, "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." That lots of people know we are facing an existential threat hasn't done the trick of concentrating our minds. Yet anyway; hopefully soon.
....
Of course, you don't want to just fight the good fight, you want to succeed -- to see good results. But you stand-in a long lie of people who have 'fought the good fight" and didn't see success in their time.
You're right on the money Bitter Crank - I was offering an explanation as to why the world hasn't been able to give up carbon. I believe it isn't due to any advantage fossil fuels have over other greener sources of energy; it's because the world has become psychologically and physically dependent on black gold.
That's where they'll run into problems. Heat destroys - maintaining the structural integrity of equipment will be a major issue. Maybe all we need is the heat which, thankfully, can be harnessed at a safe distance from the magma. The idea is to access the heat but not puncture the magma chambers, a tightrope walk by all accounts.
Sabrá Mandrake!
I'm experiencing a dopamine crisis! Apologies. Please carry on and also, very informative posts by you. I pray your efforts won't be wasted. Good luck!
Confiteur, I misunderstood the following post by Karl stone.
Quoting karl stone
Apologies.
Precisissimo!
I wasn't off-topic.
No, no, he has a point!
"They" (conspiracy theory undertones, paranoia) are stalling! To what end, may I ask?
Toilet walls are best reserved for toilet humour. I used to drive cabs night shift back in the early seventies, and one of the best bits of toilet poetry I ever saw was in the toilet of the taxi base. It read:
[i]The modern cinematic emporium
is not just a super sensorium,
but a highly effectual,
heterosexual
mutual masturbatorium[/i]
There was about a 300 mm gap under the doors of the toilets, and on one of the other doors this was written:
Watch out for limbo dancers
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]
How do you reconcile these two - that the tech was developed 4 decades ago by NASA and that KMT is lying about the tech they claim they possess?
:ok:
Quoting Bitter Crank
The pivotal concept here is "laziness". As we get older we get set in our ways, happy to relax, live off our investments, and just sort of enjoy the luxury which the hard work of our younger days has providing for us. The prolonging of one's life becomes the principal focus. It's natural that older people get lazier, as the body gets weaker. And western society is generally governed by the elders, now the baby-boomers. At this age, they have not the motivation and ambition required for radical change. The governing class, in a word, are lazy, this renders them as incapable of effecting significant change.
It appears you're not very well informed as to how democratic governments proceed. Everything must be discussed, studied, debated, studied again, discussed, voted on, studied again, debated again, voted on again, ad nauseam. It is not just a matter of the supreme ruler signing off on some peon's proposal.
I'm a philosopher too, and I consider myself a peon. So no insult was intended. Philosophers with grand ideas are not given much esteem in our society. Now, if you were a scientist, you might give them something to discuss, study, debate, study again, discuss, vote on, study again, debate again, vote on again, ad nauseam.
Iceland already receives a large portion of its energy from geothermal sources. Wikipedia says:
"Five major geothermal power plants exist in Iceland, which produce approximately 26.2% (2010)[2] of the nation's electricity. In addition, geothermal heating meets the heating and hot water requirements of approximately 87% of all buildings in Iceland."
Water is an efficient way to move energy through the ground.
I would think that the fact that water boils, therefore greatly expands, at a relatively low temperature, would be a great benefit, even though such expansion might appear to be a little bit more risky. It's really not more risky because we have all the technology required to contain steam pressure. And, harnessing energy always involves some risk.
Gas provides a better way to transport energy, like a heat pump. Also, there's a substantial distance to cover, and velocity is more important to energy transport than mass. This is the system we already have naturally in the atmosphere, water evapourates, and releases its energy into the atmosphere when it condenses. We just need to set up a multitude of similar (contained) systems in the ground.
The extreme temperatures you speak of, are the true causes of the greater risk. This would require a much greater depth in the earth, and significantly stronger transport materials. Lower temperatures and higher velocity is obviously the more practical choice.
Queen Victoria didn't have internet access. I guess she wasn't particularly prosperous.
You're looking at prosperity in absolute terms. I think this is problematic, because prosperity then gets to be defined by some arbitrary standard that depends solely on "how far people dare to dream".
Yet the _relative_ difference between the rich and the poor is the same, regardless of which time period you observe.
The scarcity of natural resources puts a limit to human expansion. If natural resources would be unlimited and easy enough to obtain, then the process of growth as has been taking place for the past two hundred years or so could continue, and your "solution" could come true. As things stand, it can't.
Well, some people think that.
Some of us are just digusted by living solely for the sake of living. All this eating, consuming, day in day out, getting nowehre, spinning around in a circle of consumption. This principle of consumption is the same, whether we're living a caveman lifestyle, or a post-industrial one.
Quoting ssu
There would be countless beggars because there'd be no work for people, were it not that some people invented new desires to cater to, even raising them to the level of "needs". That's how new jobs were created and people weren't unemployed en masse.
Do you feel no compunction at inventing new desires, new "needs" even, just so that the business keeps going?
Isn't self-confidence great!
Maybe if people learn to "believe in themselves" sufficiently, they can even live off of CO2!
But prosperity is all about absolute terms. Do you have enough and good food? Good service and medical treatment. All those machines and opportunities to make things easy. That is the start point.
You are looking at a different problem, income and wealth inequality, not prosperity itself. We seem to forget that prosperity or povetry are indeed absolute. You can have absolute povetry: you own the dirty clothes you wear and nothing else. Is there that kind of povetry? Yes. But a lot less than before.
Quoting baker
Then look at the poor people. And you can see that they are better in every country in the World than they were two or three hundred years ago. You simply cannot deny that.
Quoting baker
And that has been always the problem since the birth of our species. There hasn't been any time in history when natural resources were bountiful. They look only "untapped" for us as the technology wasn't there to for us to use them. Our technology that we have had made the limits of what are obtainable resources.
Quoting baker
Well, people who genuinely say that they are disgusted by living solely for the sake of living may have other problems. Just ask yourself, what do other animals do? Criticizing our materialism and consumerism is one thing. Criticizing living for the sake of living is another. Everything does spin around consumption: put a plant out of sunlight and look at the consequences. Perhaps people who are disgusted about consumption should simply for one day not eat anything and go to sleep hungry. The human body is perfectly adapted to be without food for a day (without water you will get a terrible headache). I think the vast majority don't have had that experience. Yet the experience of not having enough to eat and going to sleep hungry is a widely experienced feeling even today.
It is something that actually both you and me can possibly experience (not having enough food), if there's a war or similar breakdown in society.
Even two thousand years ago, and before that, they had the notion of "prosperity". They just didn't define it in terms of indoor plumbing, fancy kitchen appliances, or availability of top trauma surgeons who could sew back a detached limb.
Irrelevant. Is the relative difference between the rich and the poor that makes the relevant difference.
In my native language, the offical, politically correct word for "being poor" literally means 'socially weak'.
What matters is that Tom has less than Harry. It doesn't matter how much each of them have per se, as long as the difference between them is big enough. Middleclass people are to the elite what beggars are to middleclass people.
Maybe some time (soon!) we can learn to eat plastic. Yay!
For all our supposed superiority, we should do better than worms.
Larger homes, more servants. Same issue.
Quoting baker
So if everybody would have the living standards of what billionaires have, that would be irrelevant, if there would be those who have far better living standards than our present billionaires?
Well, I beg to differ. Eradicating absolute poverty is doable, quite possible and should what the World should strive for. And where the real work has to be done is in Africa. In fact things have improved in this view.
So @baker, you are simply talking about wealth inequality. That simply is different issue from wealth and prosperity itself.
Here's the problem:
If this year Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos decided to move into my neighborhood were I'm living, wealth inequality would skyrocket here. Yet what would be worse for me? They are not taking my money, I'm not worse in absolute terms, but I sure am worse in relative terms. Likely they would pay some meager tax to this society and they wouldn't present any problem.
You simply have to take both issues into focus, both absolute and relative. Because the fact is that societies have and can get more prosperous.
The real alarm bells should be rung when wealth inequality is rising and absolute poverty is either rising or keeping at the same level.
Quoting baker
Quoting baker
Ok, you are not serious.