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This is no scientific magazine, it´s from the latest NEW YORKER:
The “Epic Row” Over a New Epoch
Scientists, journalists, and artists often say that we live in the Anthropocene, a new age in which humans shape the Earth. Why do some leading geologists reject the term?By Elizabeth Kolbert
April 20, 2024AG, I’m getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR on your link. It’s probably a temporary problem, but for now here’s the original:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-epic-row-over-a-new-epoch
If the answer is battery cars, what is the question?
Probably battery cars are doing more damage to our environment that currently ice cars are doing.
Maybe twenty different metals required for battery cars, all mined using diesel machines, all open cast mining.
Massive fresh water usage.
Most Lithium comes from Deserts, ground water is extracted, ground water is used, that water then carries toxins.
That land will probably take hundreds of years to recover, long after battery cars are in a dustbin.
There is almost certainly not enough economically recoverable Copper on Earth to continue this lunacy.
That Copper, should be saved for making wind turbines and water turbines.
Most poor or working class people do not want battery cars, these people are being squeezed out of mobility.
Especially in London. Net Zero is being rowed back, in Scotland.
It is almost certainly not achievaeable, in the short term.Clark
for me the archive.is works…odd.
Thx for the original.
I just don´t trust original links any more for longer periods.
So I try post archived if possible here.
“So coming generations may blablabla….”p.s. lately I had a malfunction with archiving THE INTERCEPT.
Lets hope that was just me. Since it would be a pity. Despite the medium´s contradictions in reporting. But who´s perfect?
Wait…us!AG, archive.is is working now.
Good public transport would help a lot. I live five miles from the nearest town centre; my last bus home is at 17:57. On Sundays and various holidays it doesn’t run at all. The nearest Sunday and evening service is a forty minute walk on a 60mph road with no pavement.
Michael norton, I agree entirely about battery cars.
What we need is a complete change of lifestyle. Trying to do more and more, faster and faster is the root of unsustainability. Economic growth has to stop.
this is a google transl from LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE on costs of highways in France:
“Concrete monster – About the fatal triumph of the motorway”
by Nelo Magalhaes
https://monde–diplomatique-de.translate.goog/artikel/!5987040?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp
or
https://archive.is/TjXOl
(no idea why its dark)Breaking news: the government’s prosecution of protestor Trudi Warner has been thrown out by the High Court. Mr Justice Saini stated:
– “The Solicitor General’s case does not not disclose a reasonable basis for committal … It is fanciful to suggest that Ms Warner’s amounted to common law contempt.”
But why was it ever brought in the first place? Why have judges been censoring protestors’ motivations, imprisoning them for contempt, and nullifying defence arguments that have prevailed for centuries?
– “…questions are increasingly being asked about the influence of fossil fuel money on the justice system. Last year it emerged that City law firms have supported nearly £1.5 trillion in fossil fuel transactions since 2018, generating profits which permeate the system as a whole. Investigative journalism suggests it may be the fossil fuel companies themselves who are driving the crackdown on protest, via ‘think-tanks’ such as Policy Exchange.”
I read a recent article from a retired high court judge in Ireland relating to this. I went to school with her brother and her family were very involved in the local legal scene. Only ‘paupers and multimillionaires’ can sue in Irish courts, says retired judge. I have also got other family members who worked for big law firms in the UK and what she says about “billable hours” rings true. She says that said State policies had changed the legal landscape “significantly” in the past 10-20 years and have made smaller firms an “endangered species”. The vast majority of citizens do not have proper access to law under the system as it currently operates, said Ms Justice Deirdre Murphy. To vindicate the rights of the citizen, it is “certainly arguable” that the State has a constitutional duty to provide a legal system that gives everyone access to the law.
“A ruling by the Competition Authority preventing restrictions on entry to the Bar has resulted in about 2,500 barristers for whom there is insufficient work, she said. “When survival is the primary goal, the pursuit of fairness and justice will not be a priority.” When I was towards the end of my uni days the entrance exams to barrister and solicitor post grad schools were limited by a system that raised the pass mark of the entrance exams to whatever fit only the numbers they wanted to allow through. This was deemed in a court judgement to be unfair and they were forced to set a pass mark and anyone who attained that level of pass mark could go through. At the time I thought that was a fair and equitable decision but in light of what this former high court judge says perhaps there were unintended consequences. I wasn’t involved with any law studies but knew a lot of people who were finishing their law degrees at the time and were looking to get into either solicitor training roles or the barrister route.
“Another major factor is increasing corporatisation and commercialisation of law, she said. Law, instead of a vocation, has been reduced to a “business”, to be transacted on the basis of “billable hours”.” She also says ” If smaller firms and independent barristers disappear, there will be no one left to take cases to challenge the power of the State “because the big corporate firms have no interest in doing that”.”
It’s a good article. I guess even law can’t escape commoditization – or ‘enshitification’ being the more modern term.
“This international business, she said, is of “no benefit” to any Irish citizen other than a “small cohort” of top-earning barristers and solicitors.
The Government and IDA (industrial development authority) should explain how it is proposed to accommodate this business, including whether it will diminish the capacity of the High Court to perform its “core function” of upholding the law and determining and vindicating the rights of citizens.”I guess much the same thing has happened in the UK and everywhere. Big corporate law firms just are not interested in bread and butter legal issues of the average citizen because it doesn’t pay them.
AG – “(no idea why its dark)”
Firefox’s “Reader View”, the page icon at the right of the address bar, sorts it out 🙂
Michael norton – “If the answer is battery cars, what is the question?”
Er,
- “How do we distract the public with more false solutions?”
- “How can we keep richer people feeling more virtuous than the poorer people who have much lower overall emissions?”
- “How can we make it look like we’re addressing the emissions problem while stimulating economic growth?”
- “How can we suck up to billionaires like Elon Musk?”
These valuable minerals that a battery car uses, some of these minerals will run out, in less that one hundred years.
Although Elon Musk talks about recycling, you always lose some of the weight.
Recycling will be rather expensive and could be dangerous.
I can see mostly downsides to E.V.’s.In the final analysis the problem is Capitalism, and the only solution is a sustainable global economy. Just did a quick search and found this (from October 2021):
Solving the Climate Crisis Requires the End of Capitalism
It’s time to face the fact that resolving the climate crisis will require a fundamental shift away from our growth-based, corporate-dominated global system.
The global conversation regarding climate change has, for the most part, ignored the elephant in the room. That’s strange, because this particular elephant is so large, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives must contort themselves to avoid naming it publicly. That elephant is called capitalism, and it is high time to face the fact that, as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system of our globalized world, the climate crisis won’t be resolved……
(Clark, thx! On the darkness of the page: I think something happens to the LMD site during the archive-process. But only if it´s a previously google-translated page. I am having various issues with archiving translated sites. This one is new and so far only with LMD. But switching info on the page icon did the trick and made it more readable.
AG, it is good to use archived copies because pages sometimes get changed, which can make quotes and commentary confusing or obsolete. Pages can get moved or deleted causing links to fail; this is called “link rot”. Wikipedia pages change frequently so I now link to the latest revision, which is the top entry in the page’s History.
frankly I did not know of archive.is untill a year ago.
One of the super-duper skills I acquired thx to our world dancing around WWIIIp.s. however I would not be surprised if in a future point of time archive.is and everything with it will be wiped out by some attorneys, laws, bill… and then it´s all gone. So eventually either hard copy or personal saved files are the only real thing. But to keep that up is impossible.
AG, there’s also The Wayback Machine at archive.org; they know a lot about licensing and copyright law, and they’ve been going for decades. There’s a Wikipedia editors’ guide with a list of archives; editors are encouraged to support citation links with archived copies. And there’s a browser extension, definitely for Firefox and probably for other browsers, that finds archived copies from lots of archives.
A free and open source distributed archive would be very robust. There may well be such a thing but I’ve never looked.
China is still increasing how much coal it burns to make electricity and steel.
China consumes four and a third billion tons a year.
Overall, the World is using more coal now than before the Pandemic?
Even Germany is using loads of brown coal – the worst kind of coal.Yes, I know I should probably start a new thread, but then it’s not entirely unrelated, and slower speed limits – and especially 20mph speed limits in towns and villages and cities – encourage more people (including motorists) to walk and cycle. Anyway, I was just doing some research about the latest development in Wales re the 20mph limit (one of the things I’m trying to determine is who got the petition together) and, as such, came across the following article from September 25th last year:
New research details ‘astonishing’ impact of Wales’ 20mph speed limit after first week
A new analysis of traffic data, released one week after Wales introduced a default 20mph speed limit, has revealed what researchers described as an “astonishing” impact on traffic speeds across the nation.
The data compiled by transport safety specialists Agilysis explored the impact of the new speed limit on traffic speeds over hundreds of miles of roads in Wales.
The headline statistics show a 2.9 mph drop in speeds on the surveyed roads, averaging 19.77 mph compared to 22.67 mph the week before the change.
I don’t know about ‘astonishing’, and it does seem odd that the average speed was only 22.67mph the week before the change, when the speed limit was 30mph. Anyhow, it also says the following:
Sample analysis of two routes has indicated a journey time increase of between 45-63 seconds along the two 2.5km routes in Cardiff and Wrexham.
As I recall it, that’s around the average car/vehicle journey distance in towns and cities. But getting back to the petition…. until I read the article – and having only heard about the petition for the first time about a week ago – I assumed it was got together at some point AFTER the new 20mph limits came into force. But I was wrong, and under the sub-heading Backlash, it says the following at the end of the article:
The introduction of the new speed limit has sparked a fierce backlash among some members of the public in Wales.
A petition launched calling for the repeal of the laws has passed 400,000 signatures, making it the most popular Senedd petition of all time.
On Saturday, a march against the speed limit’s introduction attracted over one hundred protesters.
Presumably the other 399, 900 odd thought fcuk THAT for a lark.
The comments section is quite interesting (59), and here’s several examples:
What any sane person would have said, without the evidence, now the proof is there, 20 mph is good.
As a cyclist with almost 60 years of survival on mostly English roads, I cannot wait to come home to Wales. Best action by the Senedd in I don’t know how long.
I was very close to being taken out on zebra crossing yesterday by a cyclicst who was going hell for leather in a new 20mph zone…. [fancy that, yes, just the day before]
Only problem is reckless cyclists cannot be identified if they crash into you or your car. No number plates etc. Cyclists in my area of Cardiff are going 30/40 mph with impunity, on pavements, footpaths and parks.
__________________________
So you see it’s not speeding motorists who are the problem, but cyclists whizzing around at 30/40mph on pavements etc endangering everyones’ lives!
And crashing into cars!
“Book Review: “On the Move” Is a Must-Read Account of U.S. Climate Migration”
“The press has been reporting on more and more extreme weather events, not just unusual heat but also torrential rains that dramatically flooded Dubai. That’s on top of atypically wet weather that wrecked UK crops. Without giving a catalogue, it’s becoming clear that more and more residences and livelihoods and therefore communities are at risk from climate change.
The Pentagon had the geopolitical impact of climate change on its radar in the early 2000s. One of the early concerns was sea level rises producing mass migration out of particularly vulnerable countries like Bangladesh. But as this article describes, climate migration has already come to the US and is set to increase.”
Naked Capitalism:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04/book-review-on-the-move-is-a-must-read-account-of-u-s-climate-migration.htmlJust have a think’s Dave Borlace has a video available looking into China’s transition to renewables and away from fossil fuels. They don’t shy away from the fact that China uses huge amounts of coal currently but there is more nuanced detail. China is moving away from fossil fuel dependence on other nations to generating it’s own renewable energy at breakneck speed. The rest of the world is far away from doing this.
https://www.justhaveathink.com/is-china-cheating/.You may or may not agree with some of the semi-political views expressed but the pace of change in energy infrastructure is stunning.
Allan Howard, here’s something you might like:
– Let’s end Traffic. Start your local group today.
– Cycling Rebellion is a movement to put people before cars in our towns and cities
ET
haven´t watched yet but thx!
I do not understand why the German and European environmental activists instead of parroting the government propaganda have not started to build ties to China, India, Russia, to create networks and exchange expertise on environmental issues and above all pushing the governments of Europe to cooperate with the Chinese.
Because if Germany fails its climate targets we not gonna die. But if due to hate, PR, warmongering, isolating into blocks even more, China fails its targets we are in much bigger trouble. Then a green clean Germany won´t mean shit.
“The BBC Global China Unit has identified at least 62 mining projects across the world, in which Chinese companies have a stake, that are designed to extract either lithium or one of three other minerals key to green technologies – cobalt, nickel and manganese.
All are used to make lithium-ion batteries”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-68896707
Possibly the Chinese do intend to use less coal in the future but they have not wound down coal use, so far, they have wound it up.
The Chinese dominate Lithium-iron battery production.
While that may not be a problem to the World economy, massively using Lithium-iron battery technology for electric vehicles is not doing our planet any good, at all.
Extracting the Lithium for desert areas, utilises much of the available water.
The Lithium mining, will when over, leave that area devastated, such that it will be more or less unusable for a very long time.
What happens to the native people, who currently live on that land?
There is only a limited amount of economically recoverable Copper.
If much is splurged on electric vehicles, less will be available for other projects, like electrification of railways, wind farms and hyro projects.
These minerals should be used as carefully, as miserly as possible.Recycling, to some level is possible but complete recycling will never be possible.
Round my way, it is getting very hard to find a yard that wants to scrap cars, hardly profitable with modern cars, almost none will take electric vehicles, for recycling.
In an EV pack, there are about twenty different minerals. Economically separating these is expensive and potentially toxic/dangerous to the people undertaking these tasks.I drive an EV. It is the best car I have ever bought, and at the same time I am not directly poisoning the pedestrians I pass when I drive through town.
I don’t want to recycle my car battery because it works fine. Just as the driver of an ICE vehicle doesn’t immediately panic about recycling their engine, gearbox and transmission; when they may fail after 10 years.
At least with recycling EV battery components, there is something left to recycle. There is little recycling of petrol or diesel fuel to be had, as it has all been converted into other elements, such as Nitrous Oxide, Carbon Monoxide, and Sulphur Dioxide; all of which are poisonous to humans. If the majority of my battery recharge comes from my solar panels, then I am creating almost no atmospheric pollution at all. Maybe some tyre wear, but all vehicles have that problem.
I notice that in these cut & paste anti-ev posts, there is no mention of the equivalent environmental damage done by oil extraction. Try Googling “shale oil extraction” and ask yourself if the horrific images returned are more acceptable than the alleged future problems of mining lithium, cobalt and manganese?
We need a better way of life where people can stay in one place for longer, and stuff and people don’t need to be moved around so much and so fast. Like things used to be done before there was masses of cheap transport and everyone started taking it for granted.
Michael norton and Fat Jon; you’re both right. Electric vehicles are less damaging than internal combustion engines, but billions of private electric cars and their necessary infrastructure are still far too damaging to even contemplate. We need less bloody cars, and less flights, and less iPhones, and less all manner of unnecessary modern shite. We need more and better public provision instead, and a far less manic way of life.
Most of all we need to plan. That’s how China is currently outclassing the West, but it only buys them a few decades before minerals run scarce. We need an even better plan than that.
(West)Germany, numbers in millions
cars bicycles popul.1950 0,7 ? 50,96
1955 1,9 ? 53,52
1960 4,8 ? 55,96
1965 9,9 18,00 59,03
1970 15,1 23,00 61,00
1975 19,6 29,00 61,64
1980 25,9 37,00 61,66
1985 29,2 45,00 61,02
1990 35,5 55,00 79,75
1995 40,4 73,00 81,82
2000 42,8 75,00 82,26
2005 45,4 73,00 82,44
2010 41,7 69,00 81,75
2015 44,4 72,00 82,18
2020 47,7 76,00 83,16
2024 49,1 84,00 84,07or this one, a little animated graphic:
bikes – cars- motorbikes – buses 1960-2021
https://de.statista.com/infografik/31169/bestand-an-kraftfahrzeugen-und-fahrraedern-in-deutschland/Darn, that didn´t work out:
cars bicycles popul.
1950 – 0,7 ? 50,96
1955 – 1,9 ? 53,52
1960 – 4,8 ? 55,96
1965 – 9,9 18,00 59,03
1970 – 15,1 23,00 61,00
1975 – 19,6 29,00 61,64
1980 – 25,9 37,00 61,66
1985 – 29,2 45,00 61,02
1990 – 35,5 55,00 79,75
1995 – 40,4 73,00 81,82
2000 – 42,8 75,00 82,26
2005 – 45,4 73,00 82,44
2010 – 41,7 69,00 81,75
2015 – 44,4 72,00 82,18
2020 – 47,7 76,00 83,16
2024 – 49,1 84,00 84,07sry I am too dumb for this. But the numbers should be readable
Thanks AG. I think we can make sense of the figures, which are interesting.
Clark makes a very valid point about the numbers of vehicles and electronics; and the need for less global travel.
I don’t believe the lithium argument is valid, because by all accounts there are 180 billion tons of lithium in sea water, and we have no shortage of that on the planet. If we thought long term and built solar powered sea water processing plants, we could extract this and other chemicals, desalinate the water and use wind/solar powered pumps to move fresh water over to our driest areas.
This might also help to keep the rising sea levels under some form of control. But, do we have the will to think long term any more? Or must everything be sacrificed on the altar of ‘get mega rich quick’?
If we mostly moved to battery vehicles, and the fabled Net Zero society, just in the United Kingdom, we would need to grow out our National Grid by four times. So World Wide, impossible to resource or pay for.
I think the U.K. is only responsible for one percent of Global Warming. Solar panels only last for fifteen years, then they are almost unrecycled, just the Aluminium frames saved, rest land filled. E.V. batteries are barely recycled anywhere on the planet. Nobody wants to take old E.V. cars, too dangerous, too difficult.The average solar panel lifetime is 25-30 years. They don’t stop working after that, just become less efficient and produce less electricity. It may yet become economically viable (or imperative) to recycle the metals within them. They are mostly silicon (for now) with the rare earth metals used in tiny quantities to dope the silicon. Silicon is plentiful. Recovering the rare earth metals is somewhat more challenging for now.
Lead acid batteries were not recycled initially but there is a substantial industry now to do just that. In time, recycling of solar panels can get to the same point.Batteries don’t necessarily need to be made from lithium, especially ones that don’t need to move about such as those for houses, factories and storage for generated renewable energy. There are alternatives, pumped hydro, thermal batteries, iron batteries and other solutions. The current fossil fuel subsidies are enormous at somewhere around 900 billion dollars globally. Those subsidies could go a long way to re-purposing and building out the grid.
Michael, a large part of it is the incumbent fossil fuel interests don’t want to give up their concentrated huge profits to more energy-independent households and countries. The West with its stranglehold on the fossil fuel industries doesn’t want to give up the profits for their economies nor the political control over the provision of energy supplies. That is why China is rushing to do what it’s doing and they are a generation ahead of everyone else. When they don’t need to import such large quantities of fossil fuel for their energy needs, the West will lose that lever of control – which is what’s pissing them off.
ET, I have read that in the U.K. solar farms have a fifteen working life. Meaning that the wind and sun have “clouded” the surface, so they are not as effective as when they were new.
So, for several reasons, they are planned to have a fifteen year life span, then taken down, pannels crushed, Aluminium recovered, the rest dumped.
The farm land that was used as a site, is then returned to farming.
I expect if an ordinary person pays to have solar panels installed on their roof, they may want to keep them, until such time as they need a new roof. On, say a fifty year old roof, once you deinstalled your solar panels, you would need to have your roof replaced. Normally roofs need redoing after 30 -50 years. But have people clamber about on your roof installing panels, will not improve the weather resistance of your roof.Elon Musk of Tesla, is shedding jobs like nobody’s business, maybe the endgame is in sight?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68935522
All battery powered car makers are going tits-upMassive fossil fuel burning is going to stop; no two ways about it. It’ll stop because governments have the foresight to limit its extraction, or it’ll stop because industrialised society collapses due to its effects. If by some miracle it survives the latter, it’ll stop as it runs ever shorter – the entire fossil fuel peak can be only three centuries or so from start to finish at the rates we’re burning it, a twentieth of the time since the invention of the wheel and less than an eyeblink geologically. If we don’t drive ourselves extinct we’re going to have to learn to live without it again.
“All battery powered car makers are going tits-up”
Electric vehicle sales are trending upwards globally Tracking global data on electric vehicles
The BBC article linked tells of Tesla laying off its supercharger team responsible for building Tesla’s network of charging stations. Tesla is also facing stiff competition from other cheaper marques. The propietry charging station thing annoys me. Similar to the phone charging propietry nonsense that went on for years and took until recently to legislate that all phones must use USB C (in EU). That took way too long. It’s time to legislate similarly for EV charging stations and make them universally standard.On another note relating to batteries here is a piece about sodium battery commercial production beginning to roll out. Sodium is much more plentiful that lithium, is more easily extracted and the chemistry doesn’t need rare earth metals and safer. Ideal for static battery storage Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production
ET apparently there are many thousands of new EV cars parked in fields in China, they are struggling to find punters who want one, hence the Chinese attempt to dump them on Europe.
In Norway it seems more than half of cars on the road are now EV.
Over 80% of new cars sold last year were EV.
Next year 2025 you will no longer be able to buy a new gas guzzler, in Norway.
Most electricity in Norway comes from Hydro, they have a lot of rain and mountains. So, it is a good fit, most electricity made from renewables, not many people on the roads and stunningly high incomes. Now for the good bit, “generous financial help” is given to encourage punters to buy new EV. This has been partly funded by the Government Pension Fund Global, the World’s largest sovereign wealth fund that has amassed its wealth from the sale of Oil and Natural Gas! EV cars are not too good in very cold weather. Their range is also reduced towing and going up mountains! The amount of Oil consumed in Norway has hardly gone down, even though over half the cars are now EV?For the last twenty five years of my working life, I have been a tree surgeon, using a Diesel Landrover to tow a trailer.
There are probably many jobs that would be unsuitable to use EV.
Also, if EV becomes compulsary it will be the death of caravans being towed for recreation.
I use to go sea fishing with my mate, we used his builders van to tow his boat, about 90 miles to the coast and ninety miles back, the van was a diesel, the boat ran on two stroke petrol.
Maybe we should all stay at home and give up all socialising/enjoyment?
