Even if solar panels are used only for domestic energy consumption (ie. Electric appliances) it's worth it. Entirely different subject than BEV vs HEVs...
Yes but batteries contain toxic materials and rare earth minerals, require lots of energy to make, lots of energy to recycle, etc...
So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.
I'd wager that hydrogen is more energy efficient over the entire lifespan of a vehicle.
I can't wrap my head around how much lithium or other rare earth metals will need to be mined to transition entirely to solar, wind, and electric cars. What countries are these mined in? What percentage of the US grid is from wind or solar? Like 10%?
No lithium or "rare earths" (which are not anyway at all rare) are needed for a transition to solar and wind for power.
Electric cars use lithium, just now, and a bit of rare-earths. (They are used in wiper and window motors.) Cars are their own thing, which we would be better off with less of.
Obviously before you have built out wind and solar, you don't have much yet. It is a vacuous observation. Instead, look at the rate of deployment, which follows a classic exponential curve.
I don't know if you have glanced at a Periodic Table recently, but Lithium is on the far left hand side and far distant from anything marked "rare earth" much less the "rare earth metals" (which are primarily just right hand of the center-line). As element number 3 on the periodic table it's also per some basic interesting Big Bang statistics the third most common element in the universe. Admittedly most of the universe's Lithium at this point has settled into various compounds which are regularly called "salts" (a short, common name, because they are so common), though household table salt is usually Lithium's "big brother" on the periodic table Sodium, but Lithium itself is still just about as common as dirt on this planet even if don't tend to sprinkle it haphazardly on our foods.
Most of the mining waste you refer to is related to COAL. They produce roughly 5 billion tons a year of coal for which many times of that is waste rocks.
5 billion tons of coal gets mostly burned up.
Meanwhile 50 THOUSAND tons of lithium is produced per year. For which maybe millions tons of waste gets created.
Hmmm, 500,000 litres of water per ton of lithium. Electrolysis required to create lithium metal. Plus the required dirt being moved, water being moved, energy for electrolysis, etc...
That just compared coal 'to produce energy once' to batteries which have no inherent energy. These are different things.
Coal is an existing form of energy reserve which has stable long-term storage and can be consumed once. Batteries are not native energy, though batteries can be manufactured and then charged to temporarily time-shift energy.
> So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.
This is a standard component of LCA databases and puts the ESOI in the 50-100 range for the first generation of batteries. Subsequent generations are higher.
Electrolysers also require mining, as do fuel cells, as does any source of heat for reverse gas shift or similar.
Your fud about rare earths is also a lie for any chemistry proposed for grid storage. None of them involve rare earths in any measurable quantity (nanoscale films on semiconductors for controllers and such are insignificant)
Hydrogen (or rather hydrogen derived molecules) are a viable method of seasonal storage, but that doesn't mean most of the hype doesn't exist to greenwash gas or that your talking points aren't propaganda.
Hydrogen cars are worse than BEVs and much worse than transit or active transport.
> This is a standard component of LCA databases and puts the ESOI in the 50-100 range for the first generation of batteries. Subsequent generations are higher.
Yes that's the number I found WITHOUT accounting for mining the materials... Just manufacturing the battery.
> Electrolysers also require mining, as do fuel cells, as does any source of heat for reverse gas shift or similar.
Yes but there's far less of those materials required than the sheer amount of battery cells being produced for automobiles.
> Hydrogen (or rather hydrogen derived molecules) are a viable method of seasonal storage, but that doesn't mean most of the hype doesn't exist to greenwash gas or that your talking points aren't propaganda.
Greenwash gas? The whole point of hydrogen is to create it using renewable sources of energy... The whole problem with renewables is storing the energy since they don't produce reliable baseline energy. Hydrogen accomplishes that.
> Yes that's the number I found WITHOUT accounting for mining the materials... Just manufacturing the battery.
Are you sure you are reading the study right 'manufacturing' in standard LCA methodology also includes embodied enery/carbon of the ingredients?
You can also fermi analyse it. The absolute cheapest form of energy is lignite burnt at the mine front which is about $5/MWh. Before shortage induced price hikes, the 100 or so grams of lithium in a 1kWh battery was worth $1-2. The battery can store around 5MWh in its lifetime. This puts a fairly hard upper bound of 4-8% of the cycled energy. Phosphorus and iron are less scarce, copper might be significant. Any cost that isn't the cheapest possible energy pushes the lower bound down.
Green hydrogen is fine in niches where it's suited, but most of the hydrogen-for-everything schemes rely heavily on fossil fuel derived hydrogen whenyou look under the hood and ignore the amount of methane, CO2, and H2 that will escape at various stages. H2 is not a greenhouse gas on its own, but it makes methane much worse.
> Yes but there's far less of those materials required than the sheer amount of battery cells being produced for automobiles.
And if you look at the quantities required to replace the role of BEVs rather than as an adjunct, it's worse.
Americans have a weird fixation on translating the Bible. No religion apart from Protestants attempt to interpret holy texts without supporting ancient commentsry.
Jews have the Talmud and other commentaries, Muslims have hadiths, Orthodox and Catholic Christians have centuries of commentaries by saints, similarly Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and others all have many supporting texts, not just a single canonical one.
Yet Protestant Americans are looking for a "perfect" translation so that they can magically understand a text that was never meant to be a single text nevermind interpreted on its own. It's also strange that Protestants trust the Orthodox/Catholic church to decide what is scripture but throw away commentary by saints, including those who lived through the councils that decided what is considered scripture.
Protestants are absolutely trained to make use of commentaries. Its one of the bare fundamentals of exegesis, which is taught in first year in basically every Bible college. Its nonsensical to say that they ignore the masses of study on these documents.
yes they trained to use, however i never heared a preacher appealed to a commentary source, only to the bible itself. strange. they usually answer any question with 1 bible verse, no more.
The most common commentaries used across all the Protestant churches would probably be the Tyndale commentaries. You will also find the Tyndale's on many a Catholic priest's book shelf.
This sounds less like a complaint on professionalism, and more like a personal beef. Not one reflected by the wider church - you'll find many leaders both in and outside the Catholic church, who communicate regularly, and coordinate their efforts together.
When I say commentary I mean ancient commentary, or you could call it supplemental texts, ancient homilies, whatever. I mean writings closer to the actual time of Jesus. People like Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Irenaeus of Lyon, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, even Origin or Tertullian, and so on...
Protestants basically ignore that there's a TON of writings from the early church.
Even slightly later writings like John Climacus are still much, much closer to the time of Jesus and the early church than the reformation is, nevermind modern times.
One Protestant ministry I find helpful equips protestants to understand the Christian gospel and contemporary paganism by drawing on the rich heritage of Irenaeus's apologetic defense against the pagans of his day. That particular ministries entire idea was seeing the connection between global paganism and gnostic belief in the first centuries of the church, realizing that Irenaeus had already done the heavy theological lifting, and the current need was to learn from him (and other church fathers) and recontextualize their insights for the church today.
For many protestants I've known, the church fathers and the ecumenical councils are seen as helpful, but never carrying the same authority as the Scriptures. The authority of councils and creeds is derived from the Bible, not the inverse.
In a couple of places, Jaroslav Pelikan quotes Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield's Augustine and Calvin (a book and an author I've never heard of elsewhere) as saying "the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church." A selection of Luther's writings shows numerous entries for Augustine in the index--not all for support, it is true.
A dip into Calvin's Institutes of Religion turns up references to Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory Nazianzus, Basil, Chrysostom, and Bernard of Clairvaux.
The fact that the analysis that Protestants did failed to disagree with the Catholics on that point doesn’t mean thet let the Catholics decide the Scripture; had they done so, their decision would not have varied from that of thd Catholics on any point, but it did, because thet decided for themselves.
Canonical issues were debated during the "reformation", including canonicity of certain New Testament works (there are famous Luther quotes that often get brought out).
Were we talking specifically about corporate work? There's more to meetings or meetups than just your job.
That said, I think VR/AR may eventually be a way to enhance online work meetings. It doesn't seem like it's there yet overall, but eventually I could definitely see it working.
Can you elaborate on how VR would enhance meetings? I really don’t see the point myself. I don’t want to meet some avatar in a virtual room and I don’t know anybody who would.
There are tons of accounts of how you feel a sense of 'presence' in VR. The head tracking fools your lizard brain into thinking you're actually there in the virtual world.
If you're reading this site I'm guessing you have access to $400. Just go buy a Quest 2 and try it out for 10 minutes, and you'll see what I mean.
Compared to standard video calls, there'd be a much greater sense of presence. Head movement, hand movement, and eye contact (once that's standard) would increase how close it feels to IRL meetings.
The West's weak reaction to Russia invading Ukraine has made an invasion of Taiwan likely.
One year later and Russia still occupies parts of Ukraine, Putin is still in power and while Russia has suffered losses due to their own incompetence, Russia itself has barely suffered (well, anymore than its usual state). Russian oligarchs and the family of Russia politicians are still allowed to live in the west as well...
If China's only consequences would be sanctions, they'll gladly take it since half the world cares only about their own needs and would still trade with them, sacrificing Ukraine, Taiwan and others for cheap goods...
They would have plenty of land to be self-sufficient if their population was a bit smaller... Lots of countries outgrew their own land due to efficiency gains from globalism (India and Japan also come to mind).
