Debt Rattle April 11 2023
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One of the reasons most digital consumers and many greens know little about the destructive mining practices required to supply their phones and electric cars with REEs boils down to Chinese politics.
Decades ago this authoritarian state made the strategic decision to concentrate on REE production as part of its imperial ambitions. To dominate global markets (and it has done so), the government largely ignored the horrific environmental costs, writes Guillaume Pitron in The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy. As a consequence China has provided the REEs necessary for the technological gadgets that North Americans relentlessly employ in their daily life. Distant supply chains and China’s lack of transparency hid the environmental costs in rural China and consumers wrongly assumed their electrical cars and phones were the products of immaculate conception.
Pitron exposes the results in his book. “Concealing the dubious origins of metals in China has given green and digital technologies the shining reputation they enjoy. This could very well be the most stunning greenwashing operation in history.” Another blindness has also taken hold: “in contrast to the carbon economy, whose pollution is undeniable, the new green economy hides behind virtuous claims of responsibility for the sake of future generations.”
So here’s what green revolution actually looks like. If you’ve owned a cellphone or a computer over the past 25 years, your gadgets were probably assembled with rare earth minerals from Bayan Obo, the largest rare earth element mineral deposit in the world. Once a sacred mountain in Mongolia, the Chinese government reduced its geography to ruin as part of its strategy to dominate rare earth markets.
Over a 10 year period the cancer ridden population of the region has fallen from 2,000 to 300. “First the animals got sick, then the infants, and then everybody else,” went the local refrain. One village near the mine’s radioactive and acid tailings pond was known as “death village” because 60 of its residents died of brain or lung cancer between 1993 and 2005. Radioactive tailing waste, fluorides and arsenic have contaminated both food chains and drinking water.
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/04/07/Rising-Chorus-Renewable-Energy-Skeptics/
They just came out with a study in which measuring devices placed on top of blacktop rooves, in front of air conditioning vents etc were eliminated from the dataset – the dataset used by Climate Change pundits – at which point….
NO CHANGE.
Therefore, prepare for doom, surely, all doubters.
Still can’t explain how CO2 or heat can be multiples higher than worst fears, yet things were great for millions of years
Can’t explain why one is an ice age denier, a geology denier, despite all the scientific data of 40 cycles – we’re still in that long, well-established by science period. Disregard Science in favor of tEh sCiEnCe
Oh, but the change that isn’t happening is so fast! Maybe MORE repetition, through sheer friction, can create the heat you seek?
Where did the Vostok Ice Cores touch you?
never, ever can address CO2 trailing rather than leading heat in ACTUAL changes to climate in the real world – as opposed to the climate changing inside your imagination – yet the idea that it would precede heat is the most fundamental tenet in your religion
I can not approve or disapprove AFKTT‘s assertions since I know next to nothing on the subject.
However, I think, that I am pretty much in tune with Red‘s post few scrolls up. At one point shit has to stop.
His opponents are using so many words and go on and on just to express one single (proverbial) sentence: “I want to drive my car forever” or better yet, Dick Cheneys’s crooked mouth rumble: “American lifestyle is not negotiable”.
Well, I don’t know about that.“I want to drive my car forever” surely doesn’t conjure up a host of imageries, does it?
If you mean specifically CO2 will destroy the planet via cars, welcome to the party, make the case.
If you’re against cars on some other basis, sure, make the case. I could go on a rant, everything from architecture to city planning and zoning etc somewhere on the spectrum of agreement with you if not in exact agreement.
I have given this some thought though. Our civilization runs on OIL. Gasoline is the least valuable WASTE product from all the various processes cracking oil down into many useful – nay, necessary -parts.
Gasoline driven engines are best understood as the DISPOSAL SYSTEM for this LEAST VALUABLE component of oil.
People who want CARS to stop to “stop oil” and “get off oil now” need to explain what happens to all the gagillions of gallons of gasoline that build up relentlessly as civilization continues to function. As you process oil, a percentage of that oil WILL continue to be gasoline, no matter what.
What entirely new storage and transportation system and disposal infrastructure shall you design and build on what timeline, what’s the cost/benefit analysis for all the added materials, energy etc to build it out and run it? Where does the gasoline GO – like, do we dump it in the ocean, into the jungles of Ecuador, what?
OR is it that oil, all oil should just stop so that gasoline production can stop. AFKTT’s solution – better, and more merciful, best even, if 7-8 billion people die asap?
Like, idunno the answer to the gasoline question per se. I’m certainly not against revamping how we use cars or how much, there’s got to be a better more elegant happier way to run things.
As a retired ex-coal miner, I do worry that we are not currently creating any new coal seams for future generations to mine. Only by creating new coal seams can we support sustainable future coal powered energy.
As long as current CO2 levels remain low, earth can not grow plants fast enough to create the needed new coal seams required to support sustainable future coal powered energy.
GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pledges his full-scale support for Biden’s war policies in Ukraine, says “we” must win there.
Election promises are now a distant memory. Trump recommended this guy: Trump just loves to promote his enemies, as if he was working for the enemy. Well, this still gives you no idea of whether Trump will join in the big steal in Ukraine or will do what his voters are promised. DeSantis is also supported by the same money, so nothing will change there. Democracy is theatre at best and simple crime at its worst.
As for the Ukrainian war leaks, it is doing it’s job.
Occupying space, so something more important can not compete for that same space.According to the newspaper, the documents were posted “to a small group on a messaging channel that trafficked in memes, jokes and racist talk.”
Racist talk? So it is those right wing extremists again! God, this continuous bullshit is tiresome.
The classified Pentagon and US intelligence documents that were recently leaked and appeared on the Internet sketch out potential scenarios in which Israel would supply Ukraine with lethal weapons, CNN reported.
Wow, the owners are going to risk their favourite child, their true religious homeland? Nah, Israel won’t be put at risk without a heap more cash being provided to tempt the Israeli camp commandants. Trashing the USA is one thing, trashing Israel is verbotten, just ask Soros, how much does he spend on Israeli woke?
The United Kingdom wants to turn the territory of Ukraine into a “scorched earth” by supplying Kiev with depleted uranium munitions, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
No. The UK does not want that. The Indian does not want that. The tribe that runs the UK wants that, the same ones that are imprisoning Palestinians. The same ones working with Soros to poison the USA and the other western societies.
The US believes that elements of Ukraine’s intelligence service carried out a cross-border attack on a Russian spy plane in Belarus without approval from the Ukrainian government
Looking very similar to the US government. Like father, like son.
Wherever else we may disagree, we must look to the future and prepare for the next public health emergency. Here are three places to start.
No. The one place to start is to not allow government to get involved. It is naturally a government job, but with all government departments full of incompetents and criminals, the first step should be to prevent government from interfering in anything to do with pandemics. Same goes for the WHO, WEF, Big Pharma and all of the medically incompetent greed machines like Bill Gates.
If you mean specifically CO2 will destroy the planet via cars, welcome to the party, make the case.
As I’ve said I know nothing about AFKTT’s assertion, so CO2 back-and-forth is not in my equation, but I am certain that we simply do not know how to clean after ourselves. Earth is not yet, but on a way to become one large toxic garbage can.
AFKTT is right. That graph is terrible as it fails to account for so many other events throughout earths long history. Note that it is well known that there is considerable uncertainty in the proxies used to generate historical representations of past atmosphere and conditions.
With regards to climate, it is all about the rate of change – which with respect to our emissions is not quite unprecedented. The current rate of release of climate forcing gases is similar to that of 200 million years ago after a series of massive volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact. These events triggered a mass extinction at a time when temperatures and CO2 were far higher than today but there was also ocean acidification and anoxia (leading to mass death of swaths of different organisms at that time). However, at the same time there was also massive release of sulphate and other aerosols which have an opposite radiative forcing to CO2 thus adding further uncertainty and error to the long term representation of the relationship between CO2 and energy imbalance.
With regard to temperature AFKTT is also correct. It is almost pointless looking at changes in current air temperature when approx. 90% of the energy imbalance is absorbed by the oceans. Connected to this is the fact that warm water can hold less CO2 – therefore it is valid to ask at what point does the biggest CO2 sink on the planet switch to net CO2 release and what could the implications of that be?
Geological history has massive influence on the planets climate e.g. the shifting of continents results in shifting ocean currents and differing heat distribution across the planet – again not represented in that graph.
In summary, the climate situation is way more complex than presenting a graph on the supposed non-relationship between CO2 and temperature.
Don’t forget also that climate change is just one symptom of ecological overshoot. There are many other crises in the world that could lead to our demise as the dominant organisms on the planet: Resource depletion, Energy shortages, Soil depletion, Biodiversity loss, Microplastic contamination, Chemical pollution, Nutrient run-off, Ocean acidification, Water shortages, Famine, Antibiotic resistance, Pandemics, War, Weapons of mass destruction, Governance failure, Infrastructure collapse, Natural disasters, Migration waves, Cyber-attacks, AI consequences.Red is right, as is Kultsommor – we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Decarbonisation leads to catastrophic consequences in terms of pollution and loss of aerosol masking bringing climate into focus for a different reason.
Nobody is right, this is all speculation. Nobody can say for sure, and my haven’t we just had a recent example of that being full of shit? Relax, i have a feeling you’ll be more worried about fending off fellow humans in the near future then rogue waves and rising sea levels.
Why would you treat the 2 sides as equally-weighted, let alone assume the asserted disaster? It has been demonstrated that its proponent cannot construct logical arguments, cannot respond logically to information.
—jb-hb
Admittedly I write in odd ways, so it makes sense you’re thinking I am the one assuming an “asserted disaster.” That’s not what I am doing. What I wrote was a question about your reductio argument (and you understand your argument is a reductio, right?), which I take to be this. Afewknowthetruth is wrong because he asserts high CO2 levels result in” Planetary Meltdown” but high CO2 levels and much higher levels appear (but see Observer’s pushback here) in the geological record, and we are here now, and life flourished there then, and so there couldn’t have been a crisis of disastrous proportion (but aren’t you yourself pointing out just such a massive extinction of life in between the flourishings, or what is anoxia meant to indicate happened?), or else we wouldn’t be here, so there won’t be a crisis as significant as what killed dinosaurs, because that’s not tracking CO2, but something else that causes mass extinction, just not CO2 superabundance, which appears alongside superabundance of living things, just not humans, who came much later, when CO2 was much lower/less, and whose flourishing, while not quite as gargantuan as the thundering megabeasts, is much more musical and emergy-driven.In other words, he’s wrong because we are, when if he were right about the underlying mechanism, we would never be, since he’s arguing we won’t be, no one will, since the mechanisms can’t cope with the changes underway, and yet, as we see, we are and they —the plentiful lives we say were because their massive piles of corpses petrified among extinct niches remind us that they once were but are no more— they were but are not here, only the forks of opportunities they left behind breeding away in the shallows cracks long enough to get us back here to this, a conversation over an asynchronous Internet.
My point about this reductio argument of yours, in which you must assume his premises, his inferences, and his conclusions in order to insert that the negation of his conclusions (a negation you interpret as factually available from the geological record) demonstrates the negation of his assumptions (reductio subproofs are “indirect proofs” or “negation introductions”, right?), is that your own assumption about his assumptions is that the past will look like the future: even if you are right that the CO2 levels then are what (you take to be what) the geological record says, what is not clear is what that means about the future levels, because what is happening now is occurring in a different environment than the world then. Is the Sun the same? Is it the galactic core the same? Are you aware of any new materials in the world’s flow affecting the resilience of life to evolve —things unavailable to dinosaurs? And vice versa: are you aware of anything the dinosaurs —and the survivors of those cataclysmic changes who became different yet similar— had available to them that humans today do not when it comes to surviving significant changeable in ecoflow?
I didn’t say Afewknowthetruth has no burden of proof, I questioned how you actually think a comparison to earlier times functions, given the fact that the world now/later functions differently from then/earlier, given how thermodynamic systems change, given how the planet is in a different space, given how there are only so many times to reboot the system while waste accumulates in unusual ways. This challenge to articulate the reductio you’re making doesn’t mean Afewknowthetruth has the right assumptions: it asks are you sure you are assuming what he is assuming in order for your own argument to work as you intended?
As for this “And then again why would you presume that anyone on the side of ESTABLISHED REAL SCIENCE doesn’t care about the future?” that’s really non sequitur (haha but who am I to judge, really? 🤣) I didn’t say or imply anything about who cares about the future more than the other. Show me where I wrote something that made you feel like I am judging you for having air conditioning, or cars. (Insert your own joke about something something where it touched you)
In fact, I didn’t even write that it will get hotter (again, don’t forget you are the one making a reductio argument about temperature, so don’t take my questioning of your reductio as installation of its premises as my own). The hellscape I see in the future isn’t necessarily from the heat brought on by CO2 levels, but rather from the pollution, the toxic byproducts, the genedrivers, the genejackers, the replicators, and the “unholy reagents and gremlins” that litter the landscapes and the skies. There is still life, wonderful and everlasting, but Cronenberg, Carpenter, and Giger in form and execution.
Does this clear things up or make them more confusing? I don’t have much time these days, since I work ten hour days in a factory doing assembly work, and I am supposed to be getting up to work another ten hour shift in… four hours, so please understand that I am deliberately cutting into my sleep and my well-being for you, so take some time to read everything carefully, and I’ll try to as well with what time I have, because I value your thoughts and I hope you value others’ and use your time wisely. Otherwise, if you prefer to make me feel dejected and embarrassed to offer myself so wantonly and wastefully, just insult me and call me names and make fun of my lack of editing since I typed this on a phone and didn’t properly proofread it, or, even better, post cat memes instead and make me laugh and forget whatever was so unimportant that I didn’t get around to the sleep I was craving earlier.
Either way, be yourself fully.
The Minecraft papers posted in support of gamers’ arguments languished in the Intertubes, migrated to 4chan and finally went worldwide months later on telegram and twitter when they were altered to give a more pro-Russian slant. This is not an old geezer operation. Even though it is obvious, the western media ignores the implication that Ukraine is in dire straits; not so much due to Russian prowess, but the Ukrainians are running out of men, armament and munitions.
To be specific, this intelligence release shows that Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland are crazy ideologues. In the real world, there is absolutely no way that Ukraine will retake Sevastopol this summer. But that is their belief. If not, then they still are determined to dethrone Vladimir Putin, no matter what. But, the most importantly hidden reason is that they cannot give up their hegemonic control of the world’s economy or give up trying to gain control of Eurasia’s energy resources. Yet this is all fictional delirium. Three Western banks have already collapsed due to deregulation, overwhelming debt, and financial gambling.
If Germany had given up Belgium, WWI could have ended in 1916. Imperial Germany refused. Instead, two years later the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires were destroyed.
The compromises that would bring peace to Europe are 1) a manned barbed-wire north south DMZ across the Balkans – the Iron Curtain II, 2) allowing the Federation’s annexation of the Russian ethnic areas of Ukraine, 3) a UN Armistice, and 4) a new tri-polar world.
Who’d have thought that Minecraft is really about saving the world from a global nuclear holocaust?
@Palermos
Glad to see you have joined the sane crowd who assert that there is no proof of a problem with the climate, let alone proof to blame it on CO2, hence no need for a solution. Until it can be proven that there is any problem with the ever changing climate, then we can assume that there is no problem and that all the climate change activists are actually manufacturing a problem for their own purposes.
First the climate change people must prove to us that climate should never change. Once they have proven that, then we can discuss whether the changing climate is a bad thing. We may also speculate on what may be causing the climate to be naughty and be changing. After all, these are the people who currently settle on “climate change” as a problem, it used to be “global warming” but their assertion of a “problem” back in the “global warming” days was also unproven and all their claims to imminent disaster were proven to be false.
Why would we now believe these same old doomsayers that “climate change” is either a problem or is going to cause imminent disaster? Their science is exactly the same as the disproved “global warming” science, they are just modeling it differently these days, and modeling isn’t science, there is very little “science” in climate science. For a start these people have demonstrated in the “global warming” days that they do not know how the climate works, but now they claim to have worked it out.
One born every minute.
I am sad.
Nobody seems to be concerned about my new fake problem, that we are not creating new coal seams for future generations to mine.Related to all of you guys arguing:
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-existential-fear-button
@Mr House Are you suggesting that AFKTT has gone mental?
https://noclimateemergency.substack.com/p/climate-alarmists-and-mental-health?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web@WES Sorry WES but coal just does not have the sex appeal of CO2.
Yes, the Carbon Cult is mental, it is a form of madness. It is hypocritical, in that it relies on invective and “factoids,” while ignoring the actual science, which professes none of the dread certainty that its pretend followers claim. And some (many?) of the Cultists are just opportunists toadying to the backers of the “standard narrative.” Or neurotic children needing a fix of fear.
I am actually proud of those of us here who display the sanity to see through the lies and hysteria of the Cultists and their owners. Climate is a difficult and complex domain; it is poorly understood, so real science is very humble in its claims. We can, however falsify errant claims, so we know with some certainty what isn’t happening with changing climate, even if we aren’t sure about what is — and the Carbon Cult noise has been definitively falsified.
This process is a microcosm of the larger abuse with other fear-mongeries and manipulations. In fact, the more and closer we look, the more we see that the mythologies of our civilization are like that, and that we are steeped in lies and distortions. Where will it end? Let’s find out together, and we are doing a good job so far.And once again, I am posting a comprehensive climate-change doc that addresses all the issues in tedious detail:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0vrpxs5olpserhx/Do%20You%20%22Believe%22%20in%20Climate%20Change%3F.docx?dl=0And I offer this in a larger context of ontology and epistemology:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8vnz3ml5z730mds/Epistemological%20Engineering.docx?dl=0Thanks to us all for our hard-won sanities…
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