As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy. Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.

As I explored in a previous paper, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,”[1] many enthusiasts believe things that are not possible when it comes to the physics of fueling society, not least the magical belief that “clean-tech” energy can echo the velocity of the progress of digital technologies. It cannot.

This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.

This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.

As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.

Among the material realities of green energy:

• Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.

  • A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.

  • Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

• Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.

• By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage. //

All machines wear out, and there is nothing actually renewable about green machines, since one must engage in continual extraction of materials to build new ones and replace those that wear out. All this requires mining, processing, transportation, and, ultimately, the disposing of millions of tons of materials, much of it functionally or economically unrecyclable. //

Over the past century, there have been two significant developments. First, the U.S. has not expanded domestic mining, and, in most cases, the country’s production of nearly all minerals has declined. Second, the demand for minerals has dramatically increased. These two intersecting trends have led to significant transformations in supply-chain dependencies. Imports today account for 100% of some 17 critical minerals, and, for 29 others, net imports account for more than half of demand. //

For a snapshot of what all this points to regarding the total materials footprint of the green energy path, consider the supply chain for an electric car battery. A single battery providing a useful driving range weighs about 1,000 pounds.[15] Providing the refined minerals needed to fabricate a single EV battery requires the mining, moving, and processing of more than 500,000 pounds of materials somewhere on the planet (see sidebar below).[16] That’s 20 times more than the 25,000 pounds of petroleum that an internal combustion engine uses over the life of a car.

“I just dissected the Inflation Reduction Act,” Mills said. “Frankly, IRA’s ‘clean energy’ provisions will make you spoil the Earth to save it.”

“I’m listening,” POTUS grumbled.

“I brought you my paper, “Mines, Minerals, and ‘Green’ Energy: A Reality Check.” [1]

“Intriguing,” POTUS mumbled, as he thumbed through its 19 pages and 127 footnotes.

Mills told POTUS that the solar panels, windmills, and electric vehicles that he and congressional Democrats crave would mean mining, refining, shipping, and dumping that would scar the planet but barely nick expected global warming.

“Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a tenfold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy,” Mills said.

“Continue,” POTUS replied.

• “A lithium EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds,” Mills explained. “Such a battery typically contains about 25 pounds of lithium, 30 pounds of cobalt, 60 pounds of nickel, 110 pounds of graphite, 90 pounds of copper, about 400 pounds of steel,” plus aluminum and plastic.

• These substances must be clawed from the earth, Mills noted. This battery’s components would be purified from 12.5 tons of lithium brines and ores of cobalt (15 tons), nickel (3 tons), graphite (a half ton), and copper (12.5 tons). Isolating those commodities involves excavating 250 more tons of dirt and rock.

• Dig, baby, dig: “The mining of cobalt for batteries will need to grow 300% [to] 800%,” Mills said. “Lithium production … will need to rise more than 2,000%,” he added. “The mining of indium … will need to increase as much as 8,000%.”

• That requires power. “The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil,” Mills said. POTUS’ eyes widened.

• Energy-efficient pipelines carry 75% of oil and 100% of natural gas. For green machines, Mills observed, “Using trucks instead of pipelines entails a 1,000% increase per ton-mile in the embodied transportation of energy materials.”

• When green machines die, “[n]early all of them will eventually show up in waste dumps,” Mills noted. A decommissioned 100-megawatt wind farm’s 20 turbines will pollute “fourfold more nonrecyclable plastic trash than all the world’s [recyclable] plastic straws combined. There are 1,000 times more wind turbines than that in the world today.”

Too bad these efforts barely tame global warming.

Copenhagen Consensus Center founder Bjorn Lomborg calculates that the Inflation Reduction Act would decrease expected global temperatures by 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit to 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in 2100. Imagine lowering a thermostat from 72 degrees Fahrenheit to 71.9991 degrees Fahrenheit or (best-case scenario) 71.972 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Come on, man!” POTUS snapped. “We have this under control.”

Mills tilted his head in curiosity. From the bottom desk drawer, POTUS pulled a footlong rod.

“This was carved from a chair leg at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, America’s birthplace,” POTUS whispered. “Watch this.”

POTUS stood at his desk and waved the stick over his head. “Presto!”

[1 https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check]

Legislature approves plan to give Diablo Canyon another five years. //

The heatwave itself is expected to be unusual in three ways: It's expected to last about a week, cover most of the West Coast and extend substantially inland to interior states, and it's coming in September, when temperatures usually start to moderate.

It's also coinciding with a 15 day watering ban in the LA area:
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... l-a-county

If there's also an earthquake and a forest fire I think they get a tsunami for free.

Much is known about how the federal government leverages location data by serving warrants to major tech companies like Google or Facebook to investigate crime in America. However, much less is known about how location data influences state and local law enforcement investigations. It turns out that's because many local police agencies intentionally avoid mentioning the under-the-radar tech they use—sometimes without warrants—to monitor private citizens.

As one Maryland-based sergeant wrote in a department email, touting the benefit of "no court paperwork" before purchasing the software, "The success lies in the secrecy."

This week, an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Associated Press—supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting—has made public what could be considered local police's best-kept secret. Their reporting revealed the potentially extreme extent of data surveillance of ordinary people being tracked and made vulnerable just for moving about small-town America.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/inside-fog-data-science-secretive-company-selling-mass-surveillance-local-police

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/how-disable-ad-id-tracking-ios-and-android-and-why-you-should-do-it-now#History

NASA confirmed Wednesday that it has awarded five additional crew transportation missions to SpaceX, and its Crew Dragon vehicle, to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. This brings to 14 the total number of crewed missions that SpaceX is contracted to fly for NASA through 2030.

As previously reported by Ars, these are likely the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. While there are no international agreements yet signed, NASA has signaled that it would like to continue flying the orbiting laboratory until 2030, by which time one or more US commercial space stations should be operational in low Earth orbit.

Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 crewed missions to the station on Crew Dragon, and Boeing would fly six during the lifetime of the station. That would be enough to fill all of NASA's needs, which include two launches a year, carrying four astronauts each. But NASA has an option to buy more seats from either provider. //

SpaceX started flying operational missions to the space station in 2020, with the Crew-1 mission. Although Boeing's Starliner has a crewed test flight early next year, likely in February, its first operational mission will not come before the second half of 2023.

Additionally, there is some question about the availability of rockets for Starliner. Boeing has purchased enough Atlas V rockets from United Launch Alliance for six operational Starliner missions, but after that the Atlas V will be retired. During a news conference last week, Boeing's program manager for commercial crew, Mark Nappi, said the company is looking at "different options" for Starliner launch vehicles. These options include buying a Falcon 9 from a competitor, SpaceX, paying United Launch Alliance to human-rate its new Vulcan rocket, or paying Blue Origin for its forthcoming New Glenn booster. //

Since we now know how many flights each company will be providing NASA through the lifetime of the International Space Station, and the full cost of those contracts, we can break down the price NASA is paying each company per seat by amortizing the development costs.

Boeing, in flying 24 astronauts, has a per-seat price of $183 million. SpaceX, in flying 56 astronauts during the same time frame, has a seat price of $88 million. Thus, NASA is paying Boeing 2.1 times the price per seat that it is paying SpaceX, inclusive of development costs incurred by NASA. //

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ColdWetDog wrote:
Interesting that the $90 million lasts charged by Roscosmos isn't too far off the SpaceX cost.

The Russians were seen to be price gouging - and in a way that's true, the Soyuz development costs have been paid back years ago - but it wasn't too outrageous of a price in retrospect.

Of course, giving the money to SpaceX has many other advantages.

It's not a good comparison regarding Roscosmos seat price because the SpaceX "seat price" actually includes the complete capacity of the Dragon and it's trunk for cargo up mass and down mass.

USB4 vs. Thunderbolt 4—and everything else to know about the newest USB standard.

USB has come a long way since the 12Mbps days of the '90s. It has waved goodbye to USB-B and is inching away from USB-A in favor of the slim, reversible USB-C connector. Data transfer rates have increased so dramatically that we can run powerful setups with high-resolution monitors, speedy external storage, and numerous other devices from the USB Implementers Forum's latest open standard, USB4.

USB4 unifies the USB and Intel Thunderbolt protocols for the first time, expanding USB's capabilities while further dividing the technology into different performance classes. Adding features like dynamic bandwidth allocation ensures that USB4 is by far the most advanced USB generation.

Any of us can become better at following Jesus by focusing on the demands and spiritual realities of our work. Rightly understood, work is the training ground where good Christians are made.

How does work make us better Christians? How can we “redeem the time” we spend laboring?

If the Christian life can be summed up as being made “partakers of the divine nature” in and through Christ (2 Pet. 1:4, ESV), then I think it could also be said that the core activity of the Christian is prayer.

As defined by one 19th-century Church of England priest, prayer is “the soul’s approach to God,” and the soul that approaches God takes on the characteristics of God. It’s similar to a copper pipe—cool to the touch and reflective of external light and eventually taking on the characteristics of the flame as it is made ready for the solder.

In his letter to the Thessalonian Christians, Paul says, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:16–18).

When do we pray? Always. At what frequency? Constantly. Even when turning wrenches? In all circumstances.