I väntan på Jesus

Here is the Achilles heel of the green energy revolution, as it currently stands: “Cobalt mining in Congo,” says journalist Siddharth Kara,”drags humanity back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only for their replacement cost.” Ponder that for a minute while you charge your Tesla.

Until the peoples of the world can, as a world community, condemn putting a ten-year-old kid down a rathole to scavenge for chunks of cobalt for a dollar a day–as long as some billionaire executive can sit in an air-conditioned office in the U.S. and pretend this isn’t happening–civilization is pretty well screwed no matter what the weather. This same thing is happening in a different way in China, where hundreds of shitty little coal-fired utility plants are producing electricity to charge electric cars. And by the way, don’t spare the UK and Germany. Both are burning poor quality coal while lecturing like a banshee to the rest of the world about searing the planet. The nickel smelters for the conversion of laterite to pure form spoil the air for miles around, including the air of nearby schools–to use less cobalt you have to use more nickel, at least with current battery technology.

Or on another note, this segue is to bring the effete Governor Gavin Newsom into sharper focus: The carbon pollution produced by a year’s worth of California wildfires neutralizes the effects of EV’s. And yes, the world is aware that you’ve been buying your “rescue electricity” from the Jim Bridger coal utility plant in Wyoming.

Mr. Hubbert may have been a borderline nut job, but he was right on the money with the salvation of the planet through nuclear, though maybe just not in the form he had in mind. Kenneth Deffeyes was about the most brilliant geologist of his time (basically discovered the utility of zeolites), and he confirmed Mr. Hubbert’s curves and enlarged on them. Matt Simmons was a bird of a different feather, but he too ran the numbers, took a look at what was happening to Ghawar, and made a very astute assessment: it was over.

And it would have been, were it not for shale oil and gas. It’s a damn shame we’ve run through the shale oil so carelessly, and it’s even a greater shame that if you didn’t have a volumetric reservation in a pipeline to take away your gas the Texas Railroad Commission allowed the venting and flaring of un-frigging-believable metric tons of pure methane gas right into the troposphere–the United States no longer has the moral high ground to lecture anyone, about anything. The bitter truth is we have no energy policy, and no one in control who knows light from tight or sweet from sour. There is no one smart in energy looking at what works, what the cost of an alternative might be, and how to go about it. Nobody in power has a clue what will happen. No one!

But hey, we’re going to get to find out, simply by running this giant rushed experiment. If what I have read here for the last several months is correct, we are running out of hydrocarbon sources faster than we’re generating new ideas about how to create electricity. And electricity shortages are surely coming. To the UK. To Germany. And even to the USA.

To wit: 1) The shale oils are peaking. 2) Connate water from 5 decades of seawater flooding the basement of Ghawar is now lapping seriously at the oil layer near the wellbore, meaning that depletion is in danger of assuming a logarithmic curve. 3) Russian Far East oil production is likely going to falter because of inadequate maintenance and replace of sophisticated equipment (except maybe Sakhalin II, which is more or less run by the Japanese). 4) We’re down to the pre-salts on the continental shelves of Africa and Brazil (which used to be under the same salt bridge before the supercontinent rifted), so there’s that.

On this site I see a lot of thoughtful pieces, but also a lot of arrogance and look at me bullshit, and a lot of cocky predictions about EV’s and renewables. Somehow I guess it has been lost in translation that thousands of poor people are being more or less enslaved by the cobalt trade–which was first overlooked conveniently by a few very wealthy people, whose souls must surely be endangered by the hypocrisy. The drilling for oil and gas is a dangerous situation but at least safety meetings are mandated and the workers are paid well.

In the race to out-self-righteous the next guy, perhaps we should first have a damn safety meeting. Hint: The cobalt would flunk, as would the laterite smelters and all of China, busily collecting environmental attaboys from John Kerry and the like. In point of fact, the UK would have flunked badly when Boris Johnson prepared his speech to the climate conference in Scotland by using lamplight generated by a coal plant.

Man, you can’t make this stuff up!"

My comment: I would say, that as long as we require slaves and slave labour to uphold our wealth, we are in fact bankrupt! So, civilization has always been bankrupt, because it has always required slaves! God knows this, and remembers His/Her slaves, which in fact are martyrs, all of them, and will receive the martyr crown from the hands of Jesus, the arch-martyr.