You can still address the question.
Radical shifting of goalposts noted.
You claimed “the jobs are not in oil and gas” and asked what it had to do with the subject of the thread.
Your entire premise was faulty as were your conclusions drawn from same.
Wrong.
The purpose of this thread is not to debate green energy vs. fossil fuels but rather a discussion on the impact on how the transition will impact the number and types of jobs.
There is another source of rare Earth metals. Though we dropped the ball on mining them that doesn’t mean they won’t be available to us. Check out the article below.
[quote=“amadeus, post:21, topic:237587, full:true”]
But why ask that question? I do recall a thread sometime back where if I remember correctly you and I discussed this. Based on my research, even under current worldwide use it would probably be around 100 years. In other words, there’s still plenty of fossil fuels available. Nonetheless I don’t want to go off topic.
[quote=“Eagle-Keeper, post:26, topic:237587, full:true”]
Yes. indeed we might have discussed that. I would argue that current worldwide use is not the best metric, since it doesn’t account for growth. But yeah, that’s maybe a different topic. I’m hoping to start a thread on that one of these days. But goodnight and best to you. I retire early! We can catch up on the flip side, as they say.
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If you want to go all electric…then yes millions of workers will be need to rebuild infrastructure. Not just building energy source but also entire power grid since old existing power grid isn’t capable to handle the load that is needed/required.
So not only you have to build millions of solar panels and wind turbines…that still not going to be enough…so you still going to need fossil fuels. And keep in mind…its big waste in transfer from one energy source to another.
Example…take a propane heater that burns 30 thousand BTU’s per hour. That is direct heat from very source of fuel.
Now take that same BTU to heat water to turn a turbine and convert it to electricity and send it over the power grid back into your home only to be converted into a heat source.
So now you have about 45 percent waste in fossil fuel during those two conversions. Waste equals to greenhouse pollution that some are worried about.
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Wait, are you talking to me? I’m about to hit the sack. All I’m saying is that fossil fuels are fossils. It’s a beer glass that doesn’t get refilled. It just keeps going down. If you want to debate, it will have to wait to another day. Night night.
No I was replying to OP my thoughts.
Yes only finite sources for fossil fuels. What I’m saying in many cases it’s waste when you convert it to electricity and again back to heat for example…even with vehicles as well.
There is a finite end to the minerals mined to manufacture batteries and other electronic components too.
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Just exploring these numbers a bit more. Half of that waste is fossil-to-electric, the other half is electric to kinetic. The latter half is present in fossil to kinetic.
So if we take 22% additional waste of fossil when using a car charged by a fossil fuel electric plant then it does not take much non-fossil electric generation to offset that additional burned fossil… as compared to a 100% fossil driven automotive fleet.
This is not the entire story of the trade off, but IF the goal is reduced fossil usage overall the additional 22% penalty of using fossil electric generation is not that hard to overcome (hydro, nuclear, solar, wind)
As to the original post, the GND is just like rebuild the military and fix crumbling infrastructure. An injection of government spending into industries. It is an economic stimulus.
If it turns out it gets us to a better mixed fuel energy system I think it would be a plus due to stabilizing energy prices. The periodic price spikes in oil and gas have created their own economic problems. Choice and competition in energy sources could be very good for energy consuming industries.
The answer is simple, we can’t afford to do it in the US because of the added cost of regulation.
If it could be done profitably in the US we would be doing it.
Unless we build a few hundred hydroelectric and nuclear generating plants it isn’t possible to replace fossil fuels to generate the megawattage necessary.
Nearly all of which will be built primarily in China, not the US.
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Decades ago GM wanted to replace a whole bunch of auto assembly workers with robots. And the UAW jumped in and made a deal which would install robots at a much slower rate. And they also made GM and the other US auto makers to commit to re-education programs.
I read a couple of articles that described that many coal workers were against any type of re-education. They were confident that Trump would bring coal back to where it used to be. So now there are articles about re-educating coal workers to work in the green sector.
I would also think that the fossil fuel companies would be looking at the future and how they can be involved. Remember what happened to Kodak? They realized early on that digital was going to put their film, chemical and paper divisions out of business. And for awhile they were number one in the digital camera market. But they underestimated how much of a commodity, low margin their product would become. And it slowly killed their business.
I suppose that is the stimulus.
Hydro seems tapped out. Nuclear has been tabled for the most part and seems hard to untable.
We don’t make much progress without also making some serious gains in efficiencies. Some
Of our current energy consumption lends itself to improvements there. I don’t know how much of the gap it covers, but making efficient use of energy is definitely in the cards whichever route we end up taking.
A lot will depend on how fast the technology gets more efficient. Some of the profits will be converted to research. And the number of government grants will certainly increase. I expect to see increases in wind power production. And certainly solar panels are a lot more efficient today. I agree with you that we will depend on oil and gas for some time to come.
The trouble is that we’re focusing on sources that cannot provide consistent power levels keeping us at demand levels because wind and solar only work when weather conditions are right.
There’s almost limitless hydro opportunity but thanks to groups like The Sierra Club we will probably never be able to build another hydroelectric plant in the US and the green weenies have killed nuclear off.
The only thing left is fossil fuels to provide a reliable consistent source of power.
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Precisely…couldn’t come up with word for kinetic energy but yes. I believe we pretty much maxed out amount of kinetic energy in use of fossil fuels.
Now what I don’t believe is we have the ability to transfer our total industrial might to clean electric only. Since motorized vehicles use about 28 percent of fossil fuel used in United States.
Wind and solar won’t cut it.
I believe we now have technology/materials to use tidal flow. Nice thing about tidal flow it’s predictable.
