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Two possibilities.
Possibility One = we use up all or almost of of the fossil resources, leaving us reliant on renewable energy.
Possibility Two, we make a choice to leave the fossil resources in the ground, leaving us reliant on renewable energy.Then what.
Quickly we will come to understand, that these tools are not really renewable but they must be replaced.I’m going to go with Possibility Two, Michael. After 30 to 40 years when the panels and turbines are getting a bit worse for wear, we can just recycle them – which will be much easier than making them from scratch because we don’t have to use huge amounts of energy breaking trillions upon trillions of iron-oxygen, aluminium-oxygen & silicon-oxygen bonds.
When we stop using fossil fuels, how will we open cast mine for minerals.
We will have to keep doing this forever, what will be the energy source?
It is not likely to be electricity.
It is not likely to be hydrogen.
It will have to be a fluid.
Such as gas or oil but where will this fluid come from?See my previous comment.
@ Re-lapsed Agnostic, well it would be pleasant to imagine, you mine only once, then ever after use the same minerals in perpetuity, without any loss of those minerals. However, I would imagine, much will not get recycled as too expensive, like the fibre glass blades, especially in Britain with stunningly high electricity costs.
Clark, will be able to tell us, I doubt much is better than 50%, meaning the stuff you use to shovel in the boilers, does not equate to the stuff that come out of the boilers. Imagine a medieval peasant collecting the seed from his grown barley crop. The peasant has to decide how much seed to keep back for next years planting. If that peasant is lucky, his family can continue for one more year.
But, we all know , war, pestilence, flooding, fire are just around the corner, they come several times every century.
If we mine once, then build a collection of renewable machines, that give us just enough electricity to carry on for another year or so, what happens, when inevitably the shit hits the fan?
What to fall back on. Our present system needs continual growth.Thanks for your reply Michael. Most of the mass of a wind turbine is steel and almost all of that gets recycled at the end of a turbine’s working life. It’s more difficult to recycle the blades because they’re usually made with thermoset plastics which are difficult to separate from the glass fibre, which is why many of them end up in landfill. Increasingly however, blades are being made using thermoplastics which are easier to recycle. Energy could be a lot cheaper in Britain if we installed 10,000 15-megawatt floating turbines in the North Sea, along with electrolysis plants to produce hydrogen from a large portion of the electricity they generate.
Medieval peasants often struggled to feed their families because they didn’t have much of a clue about what they were doing (e.g. they were literally pissing away fertiliser). Modern arable farmers can feed both their families and much of the country, because they get much higher yields due to generous applications of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium etc. If the shit hits the fan, it’s better to be able to generate energy from the sun and wind, than have to rely on oil, gas or uranium from other countries.
Woodsmith Mine – Polyhalite
“The shaft sinking team working on Anglo American’s Polyhalite project in North Yorkshire reached halfway in its 1.6km deep service shaft towards the end of 2024.”
https://www.geplus.co.uk/news/woodsmith-makes-shaft-sinking-progress-despite-project-slowdown-31-01-2025/This mine is supposed to be operational for about one hundred years, when it starts functioning.
No more need for peasant piss.As Ed Milliband gives the go-ahead for more nuclear power for Britain, he claims that by 2050 we will use 50% more electricity, than we currently use.
I’m sure it is not beyond the brain power of humans to build sun orbiting/following satellites which can absorb energy from the sun and then beam it to earth constantly.
In fact if we didn’t insist on building so many earth orbiting satellites with the sole purposes of spying on people, or destroying their electronic systems, we would have probably built the sun orbiting ones already.
173,000TW reaches the earth every millisecond. Even allowing for atmospheric absorption and scattering, this is still about 1360W per sq m, and is enough to keep humanity going by a factor approaching 10,000.
Therefore, we have no shortage of energy, just a shortage of intelligent thinking which would make use of it, rather than endless warmongering projects.
@ Fat Jon,
most technologies take at least a third of a century before they are rolled out to the general public.
My point is, there must be a finite quantity of relatively easily gained minerals.
This will be true, if Global Warming is modest or hugely impactful.
If only half of the population of the world has better than a mere existence, should not some of the minerals be reserved for the poor, or should the rich gobble them up in double quick time?
I am particularly think about batter cars.
Maybe twenty different minerals used in E.V. battery tech.
The cars and batteries are disposable.
Solar panels are disposable. Wind turbine blades are disposable, just like one use dog shit bags.Fat Jon:
– “I’m sure it is not beyond the brain power of humans to build sun orbiting/following satellites which can absorb energy from the sun and then beam it to earth constantly.”
Oh fuck. I see this sort of suggestion more and more. Fat Jon, another term for the technology you propose is “multi gigawatt death ray that could hit any target on Earth from orbit”. Who’s in the best position to build one? Elon Musk, of the most militarily violent empire ever to have existed. What could possibly go wrong? Apart from its guidance system of course, because we would need to keep those beams focussed on the reception sites, and not randomly burning their way across the surface.
Apart from which, we already have too much energy at Earth’s surface without collecting even more from above the clouds. And launching just one of Musk’s new rockets burns about 9000 tonnes of methane in just the first five minutes.
Bad, bad, bad idea.
Michael:
– “should not some of the minerals be reserved for the poor, or should the rich gobble them up in double quick time?”
Yes. A very important political question. Current politics is just making the rich richer, and has been since Thatcher and Reagan made increasing inequality not just respectable, but revered, worshipped by the ruling class.
Yet the richer people are the more damage they do and the more finite resources they turn into landfill:
thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2025/03/07/climate-crisis-richest-people/
thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/01/15/donald-trump-fossil-fuel-allies/
So basically what we are saying is, we are such a violent society that technological progress is banned unless we can guarantee it will not be used as a weapon?
Which is why advanced alien civilisations have already told us that, and why they can fly around within our gravitational field at high speeds, and why we need to burn thousands of litres of kerosene just to try (and fail) to keep up with them.
Oh well. I suppose we get what we deserve.
@ Fat Jon, one of the world’s limiting elements for Net Zero is Copper.
The more devices people buy, the more Copper is needed.
The more Battery cars there are, the more Copper is needed.
The more Wind Farms there are, the more Copper is needed.
At present Copper is only economically recoverable if there is at least 0.5% Copper in the rock.
Most of the high grade stuff has already been robbed out.So Ed Milliband saying he wants or expects the U.K. to use 50% more electricity by 2050, needs to explain where he will mine that Copper.
I do not think we any longer mine Copper ( or much else) in the U.K.
Although we might think the U.K. is a rich country ( going down the pan – fast)
would it be equitable for the U.K. to have limitless Electricity, if half the World has very, very, very little Electricity.
There is only the Copper that there is.
If we gobble more than our fair share, there will be less, for the poorer half of the World.
That might mean they have to keep cooking on animal dung or burn down their last vestige of old growth forest, to provide for their continued existence. Thus removing a Carbon sink.What I am strongly suggesting, is that all countries of the World, should be more modest in their consumption.
There is only one planet.
This carefulness with resources is irrespective of Global warming being awful or just bearable.Fat Jon, I don’t think humans typically form violent societies. But I do think we form violent power structures. That’s what makes me tend towards anarchism. Note, anarchism, the political system in which the ordinary population routinely and continually challenge any power structure that arises, not anarchy in the sense of disorganised, random, and misdirected violence.
We all love to hate politicians, but how many of us are willing to participate frequently and routinely in political process ourselves? How many of us are willing to accept that degree of responsibility, and have the fingers that point at politicians, point at us?
I think a lot of the trouble lies in self selection. To become an MP, for instance, one has to put oneself forward, and compete to be a candidate. Reluctant leaders, such as Jeremy Corbyn, are as rare as hens teeth.
This is why I’ve been so keen on Extinction Rebellion, or XR. XR has been depicted by the legacy media as exclusively an anti-emissions organisation, but XR itself has always been clear that its mission is to address the climate and ecological crisis. Yet it has no emissions nor ecological policies. It isn’t pro or anti nuclear power, wind farms, solar panels, or gas power stations. It has three demands:
1) Tell the Truth about the climate and ecological crisis,
2) Act with urgency about this, and
3) Decide Together what actions to take, by means of People’s and Citizen’s Assemblies.So really, it’s pressing for truth, and for proper democracy. Not mere five yearly voting for self selected, politically ambitious candidates, but real people getting involved and working out how to address our predicament together.
But the last thing the legacy media wants is People Power, hence the widespread misrepresentation of XR and its aims.
XR also teaches how to organise and participate in people’s and citizen’s assemblies. Other groups are doing likewise, groups such as Assemble, The Humanity Project, and up north, the Social Justice Party.
Do you trust governments or politicians? No? Then get involved!
There are these geologial features in the West Country, called Batholiths.
They are stuffed full of minerals.
The old miners will not have got all the load out, partly because they could only go so deep with their pumping but mainly because it was cheaper to get the tin from Malaysia/Burma or South America.Hemerdon pluton, near Plymouth has one of the world’s best resource of Tungsten
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerdon_MineActually, the whole thing is the Cornubian batholith
the Plutons are the local high spots.
“The volume of the batholith was estimated in 1989 to be around 68,000 cubic kilometres.”
