Thanks for the excellent write-up, codifying what many have seen across different reports before. But I think it is clear the situation.
You write "If proponents of NZE got their wish, America’s entire electricity grid would become beholden to the Communist nation, as well, because of China’s dominance in the supply chain for minerals." Given that those most keen on energy transition have shown themselves to be communists in all but name, it is clear that is their ultimate goal.
With luck, under the new Trump administration, many of these impediments will be removed and the US will be able to utilize its natural bounty of assets effectively and arguably in the most environmentally sound manner possible.
Another worrying factor is that the managers (and governments) of the Western Democracies didn't just offshore our manufacturing to China, they also neglected to ensure access to the raw materials needed to resume Western manufacturing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have completely outmanoeuvred us by a strategic plot to secure a monopoly of the supply of many raw materials. As the countries who supply raw materials often have corrupt governments, and with the ending of empire Western countries have little influence, China has now obtained a global monopoly stranglehold on our planet's essential resources. Shortsightedness in a nutshell.
Silk Road, belt and braces or whatever they called the strategy of bribing a few corrupt leaders (South Africa), trick them into a loan they can’t afford, then seize land due non payment while securing 100% of resource yield at fixed price against debts. China makes USA state dept look like choir boys.
Why would the WEF care that there aren't enough rare-Earth minerals on the whole planet to replace everyone's car? That word "rare" says it all. But then, the WEF's Net Zero has never been about saving the planet from the WEF's other fallacy, the imagined "climate emergency", but by their own admission is really a mechanism for Global Wealth Redistribution. All part and parcel of the WEF's other great project, The Great Reset, where the majority of us return to a New Feudalism, survival farming, while our new Overlords live on in privileged luxury.
one of my keenest desires is to have the Trump administration label WEF a terrorist organization as its mandates are completely antithetical to the US Constitution, and perhaps simply put many of them in jail
Unfortunately Trump is a sociopath hence susceptible to bribery and flattery manipulation. But it would bring me joy to see WEF correctly labelled, along with various UN organizations.
Sociopath?!? How do you figure that? Bribery & flattery manipulation are what sociopaths do, not what they are susceptible to.
He is a narcissist & egomaniac but he is also charitable, kind, gregarious, pragmatic, a negotiator and a builder. Which is far above any president in the past 30yrs at least.
The prices of a wide range of commodities can be tracked here: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodities There are a few puzzles: copper is only up 7.9% on the year, lithium down 39%. Silver is another to watch for its use in photovoltaics and a hedge, like gold, against economic rough seas; up 32%. Germanium fits the picture, up 93%.
I would hope that some folk would find the book ' Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future' by Ed Conway as fascinating and eye-opening as I did.
A final personal comment: the scale of central government intrusion in our lives is oppressive,, coercive, negative in its effect, and (faint hope) could do with massively reining in (I write from the UK where the degree of acceptance of this is alarming).
If people are worried about vehicle emissions (spoiler shocker; I’m not worried) then Toyota is and always was right with their 1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV.
Simple, elegant, intelligent, everything the climate /nsane are not.
From vehicle standpoint, reduce mining required by 90x?
That is a rather meaningless claim, it sure as hell wouldn't make a rule. As in the article, BEVs use 2.4x the copper, probably the most critical mineral. Vastly more nickel, also important. Cobalt, manganese, lithium, graphite of much lower importance. And I don't know where they get the emissions number from, embodied emissions in the vehicle? Certainly not cradle to grave overall emissions.
"1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV"
Every $1 of GDP requires ONE KILOGRAM OF MINED MATERIALS. See the Energy IS the Economy chapter of my Amazon book, New Nuclear is HOT!, by transiting my article, https://hargraves.substack.com/p/energy-is-the-economy
On average in 2022 each $1 of economic production, gross world product (GWP),
Thanks for the huge number of facts. Like this, for example:
"a 3-megawatt wind turbine (the average size of a new turbine in 2021) requires nine tons of copper, 335 tons of steel, 1,200 tons of concrete, three tons of aluminum, and two tons of rare earth elements. An average offshore 3.6 MW wind turbine requires approximately 32 tons of copper."
We either need to permit a lot more mining or we need to cancel the crazy net zero idea.
I related this anecdote before but maybe not here.
A friend who is a very experienced mechanical/electrical engineer here in canada in the mining sector but now semi-retired was hired as a consultant to a company applying to build a new copper mine in BC.
I ran into him in the Vancouver airport in June 2023 as he was returning from a permit hearing, the permit was denied and the company was directed to start over.
The initial application was in 2009!!
14 years and nothing.
There is no transition, the climate/insane are the ones actively preventing it.
That's what happens when you let crooked, despicable politicians install voting machines, which take 2 weeks to give you unverifiable results vs the traditional hand counted paper ballots you get verifiable results in a few hours.
All mining, along with solar, wind, and grid lines on public lands and elsewhere is destroying habitat for imperiled species. The mining for lithium for EV batteries at Thacker Pass, NV, for instance, is completely destroying prime habitat for sage-grouse, pronghorn, golden eagles, endangered spring snails, pygmy rabbits, wildflower, sagebrush, and more. This article describes what humans "need" (really, "want") in terms of "resources", but completely ignores that we really do need flourishing ecosystems and a functioning web of life, as we too are mammals relying on that web for our own lives. We cannot continue to sacrifice ecosystems and non-human life for endless "resources" - energy or materials.
We can always mine asteroids. One asteroid has a million $trillion worth of minerals. Easy to send down the Earth's gravity well. You just need an ablative heat shield and drop it into a shallow sea or desert.
The actual mines do destroy habitat, but their land 'footprint' is small, so they are not "completely destroying" prime habitat - that is a gross exaggeration. Nevada still has millions of acres of beautiful open land. I appreciate your passion for our ecosystems, but wish you weren't so radical about it.
Between old mines leaving a toxic legacy (NV is littered with them), new mines, nuclear blast zones, military target zones, ranching, roads fragmenting habitat, growing urban areas, and now solar and grid lines, unfortunately land suitable for thriving ecosystems is getting much harder to come by.
That's why we need concentrated energy. One ounce of thorium will supply the US per capital total primary energy supply for 80yrs. Minuscule effect on the environment. And reducing human impact on the environment requires more energy, not less.
We have been improving the CO2 levels above their former starvation value, dropping to 180ppm 20kyrs ago. At 150ppm plants die.
Life is biota. Increasing biota is increasing life. If you like vast dry sterile deserts, go to Mars, lots of that there. Lots of that on 100's of billions of planets in our Galaxy. Only one that we know of with biota.
Climate alarmists are what I term, ‘One Step Thinkers.’ They are the type of people who think food comes from grocery stores and power comes from the socket thing you plug cords into.
“At this rate it will take 1,400 years to permit one million miles of transmission lines, dramatically illustrating that policymakers have embraced grossly unrealistic goals and timelines in which to achieve any semblance of an energy transition.”
Laughed out loud when I read this. But my smile quickly turned into a frown.
It is easy to make statements but hard to assess reality.
A key point in the article: "...The key driver of mineral demand in the “energy transition,” however, stems mostly from battery electric vehicles, which use 80 kilograms of copper vs 22 kilograms for an average internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, as you can see below. Electric vehicles also need manganese, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth—minerals that aren’t required for ICEs. (Electric buses are even more mineral intensive, as they need 253 kilograms of copper)..."
So a BEV that travels a US avg of ~20k passenger-miles per year uses 30% of the minerals needed for a motorcoach or bus that travels an avg of 1.1M passenger-miles/yr. So 55X the utility for 3X the minerals. You will get much bigger numbers comparing large BEV trucking vs BEV light vehicles in terms of cargo moved/yr.
So obviously are limited mineral resources should be focused on electrification of heavy vehicle transport, not light vehicles. Trucking, Buses, LRTs, Heavy Equipment, Ferries & short distance shipping, Mining Equipment and Rail. That is diesel replacement. Our diesel supply is precarious. And will get worse. Gasoline is plentiful. Replacing gasoline with electricity increases the diesel shortage. And the economics heavily favors electric vs diesel heavy transport.
The way this nation addresses resource development issues is akin to getting 50 single-issue advocates into a room, telling them of the plan, then setting them loose to publicize their single issues about why they are AGAINST the plan. And by coincidence, every one of those single issues happens to have a cut-out in the laws to make it impossible to work around those issues. See the balance between mining and solar energy as described in the article.
As long as that is the case, it explains why nothing positive will ever get done in the US about this trip down the dirt road of destitution.
As a bumper sticker on the car of a farmer or geologist said in Tucson a few years ago, "Everything we need is either grown or mined." (The quote is mostly right.) And the majority of voters and politicians (nearly all democrats) support net zero but reject mining. The mining people have been trying to permit a copper mine south of Tucson for nearly 20 years and are still no permit.
Thanks for the excellent write-up, codifying what many have seen across different reports before. But I think it is clear the situation.
You write "If proponents of NZE got their wish, America’s entire electricity grid would become beholden to the Communist nation, as well, because of China’s dominance in the supply chain for minerals." Given that those most keen on energy transition have shown themselves to be communists in all but name, it is clear that is their ultimate goal.
With luck, under the new Trump administration, many of these impediments will be removed and the US will be able to utilize its natural bounty of assets effectively and arguably in the most environmentally sound manner possible.
Another worrying factor is that the managers (and governments) of the Western Democracies didn't just offshore our manufacturing to China, they also neglected to ensure access to the raw materials needed to resume Western manufacturing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have completely outmanoeuvred us by a strategic plot to secure a monopoly of the supply of many raw materials. As the countries who supply raw materials often have corrupt governments, and with the ending of empire Western countries have little influence, China has now obtained a global monopoly stranglehold on our planet's essential resources. Shortsightedness in a nutshell.
Silk Road, belt and braces or whatever they called the strategy of bribing a few corrupt leaders (South Africa), trick them into a loan they can’t afford, then seize land due non payment while securing 100% of resource yield at fixed price against debts. China makes USA state dept look like choir boys.
Why would the WEF care that there aren't enough rare-Earth minerals on the whole planet to replace everyone's car? That word "rare" says it all. But then, the WEF's Net Zero has never been about saving the planet from the WEF's other fallacy, the imagined "climate emergency", but by their own admission is really a mechanism for Global Wealth Redistribution. All part and parcel of the WEF's other great project, The Great Reset, where the majority of us return to a New Feudalism, survival farming, while our new Overlords live on in privileged luxury.
one of my keenest desires is to have the Trump administration label WEF a terrorist organization as its mandates are completely antithetical to the US Constitution, and perhaps simply put many of them in jail
Unfortunately Trump is a sociopath hence susceptible to bribery and flattery manipulation. But it would bring me joy to see WEF correctly labelled, along with various UN organizations.
Sociopath?!? How do you figure that? Bribery & flattery manipulation are what sociopaths do, not what they are susceptible to.
He is a narcissist & egomaniac but he is also charitable, kind, gregarious, pragmatic, a negotiator and a builder. Which is far above any president in the past 30yrs at least.
And so far, this term, he is looking VERY good.
Thank you Sarah and EBBs. Your subscribers may also be interested in this presentation by Mark Mills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Gi0vObVSo
The prices of a wide range of commodities can be tracked here: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodities There are a few puzzles: copper is only up 7.9% on the year, lithium down 39%. Silver is another to watch for its use in photovoltaics and a hedge, like gold, against economic rough seas; up 32%. Germanium fits the picture, up 93%.
I would hope that some folk would find the book ' Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future' by Ed Conway as fascinating and eye-opening as I did.
A final personal comment: the scale of central government intrusion in our lives is oppressive,, coercive, negative in its effect, and (faint hope) could do with massively reining in (I write from the UK where the degree of acceptance of this is alarming).
The numbers don’t lie.
If people are worried about vehicle emissions (spoiler shocker; I’m not worried) then Toyota is and always was right with their 1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV.
Simple, elegant, intelligent, everything the climate /nsane are not.
From vehicle standpoint, reduce mining required by 90x?
That is a rather meaningless claim, it sure as hell wouldn't make a rule. As in the article, BEVs use 2.4x the copper, probably the most critical mineral. Vastly more nickel, also important. Cobalt, manganese, lithium, graphite of much lower importance. And I don't know where they get the emissions number from, embodied emissions in the vehicle? Certainly not cradle to grave overall emissions.
"1:6:90 rule, the minerals needed for one full EV can be used to build 90 hybrids and over the life of those vehicles the 90 hybrids saves 37x more emissions than the single EV"
Wow. thanks for the numbers. It's amazing.
Every $1 of GDP requires ONE KILOGRAM OF MINED MATERIALS. See the Energy IS the Economy chapter of my Amazon book, New Nuclear is HOT!, by transiting my article, https://hargraves.substack.com/p/energy-is-the-economy
On average in 2022 each $1 of economic production, gross world product (GWP),
demands 1 kWh of heat energy,
uses 0.27 kWh(e) of electric energy,
emits 0.21 kg of CO2, and
requires 0.96 kg of mined minerals.
Graphic image at https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb0aebd40-03a3-43db-a59a-b55f41fecc72_1920x1080.heic
Thanks for the huge number of facts. Like this, for example:
"a 3-megawatt wind turbine (the average size of a new turbine in 2021) requires nine tons of copper, 335 tons of steel, 1,200 tons of concrete, three tons of aluminum, and two tons of rare earth elements. An average offshore 3.6 MW wind turbine requires approximately 32 tons of copper."
We either need to permit a lot more mining or we need to cancel the crazy net zero idea.
"We either need to permit a lot more mining or we need to cancel the crazy net zero idea."
How about both???
Now that's a smart plan.
And
I related this anecdote before but maybe not here.
A friend who is a very experienced mechanical/electrical engineer here in canada in the mining sector but now semi-retired was hired as a consultant to a company applying to build a new copper mine in BC.
I ran into him in the Vancouver airport in June 2023 as he was returning from a permit hearing, the permit was denied and the company was directed to start over.
The initial application was in 2009!!
14 years and nothing.
There is no transition, the climate/insane are the ones actively preventing it.
That's what happens when you let crooked, despicable politicians install voting machines, which take 2 weeks to give you unverifiable results vs the traditional hand counted paper ballots you get verifiable results in a few hours.
All mining, along with solar, wind, and grid lines on public lands and elsewhere is destroying habitat for imperiled species. The mining for lithium for EV batteries at Thacker Pass, NV, for instance, is completely destroying prime habitat for sage-grouse, pronghorn, golden eagles, endangered spring snails, pygmy rabbits, wildflower, sagebrush, and more. This article describes what humans "need" (really, "want") in terms of "resources", but completely ignores that we really do need flourishing ecosystems and a functioning web of life, as we too are mammals relying on that web for our own lives. We cannot continue to sacrifice ecosystems and non-human life for endless "resources" - energy or materials.
We can always mine asteroids. One asteroid has a million $trillion worth of minerals. Easy to send down the Earth's gravity well. You just need an ablative heat shield and drop it into a shallow sea or desert.
The actual mines do destroy habitat, but their land 'footprint' is small, so they are not "completely destroying" prime habitat - that is a gross exaggeration. Nevada still has millions of acres of beautiful open land. I appreciate your passion for our ecosystems, but wish you weren't so radical about it.
Between old mines leaving a toxic legacy (NV is littered with them), new mines, nuclear blast zones, military target zones, ranching, roads fragmenting habitat, growing urban areas, and now solar and grid lines, unfortunately land suitable for thriving ecosystems is getting much harder to come by.
That's why we need concentrated energy. One ounce of thorium will supply the US per capital total primary energy supply for 80yrs. Minuscule effect on the environment. And reducing human impact on the environment requires more energy, not less.
We have been improving the CO2 levels above their former starvation value, dropping to 180ppm 20kyrs ago. At 150ppm plants die.
Life is biota. Increasing biota is increasing life. If you like vast dry sterile deserts, go to Mars, lots of that there. Lots of that on 100's of billions of planets in our Galaxy. Only one that we know of with biota.
Climate alarmists are what I term, ‘One Step Thinkers.’ They are the type of people who think food comes from grocery stores and power comes from the socket thing you plug cords into.
Fabulous job!
The obvious solution is to stop wasting resources on wind and solar, and get on with a build out of nuclear, which uses far less resources.
“At this rate it will take 1,400 years to permit one million miles of transmission lines, dramatically illustrating that policymakers have embraced grossly unrealistic goals and timelines in which to achieve any semblance of an energy transition.”
Laughed out loud when I read this. But my smile quickly turned into a frown.
It is easy to make statements but hard to assess reality.
A key point in the article: "...The key driver of mineral demand in the “energy transition,” however, stems mostly from battery electric vehicles, which use 80 kilograms of copper vs 22 kilograms for an average internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, as you can see below. Electric vehicles also need manganese, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth—minerals that aren’t required for ICEs. (Electric buses are even more mineral intensive, as they need 253 kilograms of copper)..."
So a BEV that travels a US avg of ~20k passenger-miles per year uses 30% of the minerals needed for a motorcoach or bus that travels an avg of 1.1M passenger-miles/yr. So 55X the utility for 3X the minerals. You will get much bigger numbers comparing large BEV trucking vs BEV light vehicles in terms of cargo moved/yr.
So obviously are limited mineral resources should be focused on electrification of heavy vehicle transport, not light vehicles. Trucking, Buses, LRTs, Heavy Equipment, Ferries & short distance shipping, Mining Equipment and Rail. That is diesel replacement. Our diesel supply is precarious. And will get worse. Gasoline is plentiful. Replacing gasoline with electricity increases the diesel shortage. And the economics heavily favors electric vs diesel heavy transport.
The way this nation addresses resource development issues is akin to getting 50 single-issue advocates into a room, telling them of the plan, then setting them loose to publicize their single issues about why they are AGAINST the plan. And by coincidence, every one of those single issues happens to have a cut-out in the laws to make it impossible to work around those issues. See the balance between mining and solar energy as described in the article.
As long as that is the case, it explains why nothing positive will ever get done in the US about this trip down the dirt road of destitution.
Canada was bought by China for a pittance. Justine will dance for coins.
As a bumper sticker on the car of a farmer or geologist said in Tucson a few years ago, "Everything we need is either grown or mined." (The quote is mostly right.) And the majority of voters and politicians (nearly all democrats) support net zero but reject mining. The mining people have been trying to permit a copper mine south of Tucson for nearly 20 years and are still no permit.