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Earth has limited natural resources to continually support the generation of electricity : Comments
By Ronald Stein and Cleveland Jones, published 1/4/2025Earth’s natural resources are being extracted at alarming rates but not being replenished. The 4-billion-year-old planet's 'wells' will run dry at some time.
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Posted by ateday, Tuesday, 1 April 2025 3:03:43 PM
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For shame, Ronald. United Nations Net Zero will fix thing. Population growth forever, limitless supplies of green energy for free, earth to "capture" residual "emissions", and guilty global north pays loss & damage to virtuous global south. What could possibly go wrong?
Posted by Steve S, Tuesday, 1 April 2025 3:25:54 PM
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Although I agree with the authors that the world should adopt nuclear energy (and fast breeder reactors) for the generation of electricity, their arguments about running out of coal, gas and oil are flawed. From the references they supply it is a simple calculation to determine the rate of increase in proven reserves is greater than current consumption. The authors assume that proven reserves have suddenly stopped in order to obtain ridiculously short periods till we run out of coal, gas and oil.
The real question that needs answering is at what rates is the earth naturally producing coal, natural gas and oil and is this more or less than our rates of consumption? I don’t believe anyone has the answers. All we can say is, “So far we are consuming less than our proven reserves are growing” and therefore we have no idea when we might run out of those resources. In terms of the elements in the periodic table the Earth is effectively a closed system (except for the negligible natural and man-made radioactive decay, and the accumulation of cosmic dust). In this sense all Earth’s resources are finite and all that is required to make the compounds we need from these basic elements is energy. Given that nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, the most efficient and environmentally friendly means of generating energy is nuclear fission. Posted by EGr, Wednesday, 2 April 2025 3:01:42 PM
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Following on from ateday's comment this site describes the situation:
http://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org Posted by Daffy Duck, Wednesday, 2 April 2025 5:05:27 PM
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The authors are correct in one sense about oil.
Crude Oil production peaked in 2005. NB I said crude oil. But more important than that have a look at Shell and British Petroleum, pardon me, Beyond Petroleum I should say. Shell has reconstructed the company since at their AGM at the Hague in 2017 they announced the company had formed a group to plan how to exit the oil industry. All the national companies are now under Shell Limited on the London stock e change. Shell has sold all their UK and German service stations. Even in Australia you can see it as Shell stations change to AMPOL. The reason given is that the cost to find new oilfields and then develop them is not worth the investment. What does that tell you ? Posted by Bezza, Saturday, 5 April 2025 10:52:08 PM
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There are just too many homo sapiens.
Unfortunately getting all 8 billion of us to agree to a common goal could be well nigh impossible.
The end result is pretty obvious.