[MCN] 16th, 20th, and 21st Century energy crises, and their consequences

[Lance Olsen]

16th century

“There was little incentive before the mid-16th century to dig deep into the soil in search of this dirty fuel as long as wood was available, and there seemed to be an abundance of that. Biringuccio himself believed the forests of Europe could fill all conceivable future demands for fuel. In Pirotechnia he wrote: "Miners are more likely to exhaust the supply of ores than foresters the supply of the wood needed to smelt them. Very great forests are found everywhere, which makes one think that the ages of man would never consume them...especially since Nature, so very liberal, produces new ones every day." Coal is mentioned only once in long treatise and then just to dismiss it: "Besides trees, black stones. that occur in many places, have the nature of true charcoal. [but] the abundance of trees makes [it] unnecessary ... to think of that faraway fuel. 

“Less than a generation later the English turned to coal under pressure from the high price of wood.”

John U. Nef. An Early Energy Crisis and Its Consequences. 
Scientific American November 1977

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
20th century

“A new area of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call social traps. The term refers to situations in society that contain traps formally like a fish trap, where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see no easy way to back out of or to avoid."

John Platt. Social Traps. American Psychologist, August 1973

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
21st century

Elizabeth Kolbert: " And I think the point that Bill has made, and I agree with it, is maybe we can avoid the worst possible future. But I don’t think at this point we can avoid a lot, a lot, a lot of damage.”

Bill McKibben: “Look, Betsy’s right. So we’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing maybe for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible. That’s an open question. There are scientists who tell you we’re already past that point. The consensus, at least for the moment, is that we’ve got a narrow and closing window, but that if we move with everything we have, then, perhaps, we’ll be able to squeeze a fair amount of our legacy through it. But Betsy is right, an already very difficult century is going to become a lot harder no matter what we do. It’s at this point trying to keep it from becoming not a difficult and even miserable century but a literally impossible one.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report <https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/bill-mckibben-and-elizabeth-kolbert-on-the-un-extinction-report>

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A $7 trillion climate change warning to the stock market from its biggest shareholder <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEN5OJVrMX8W68TbOuXyhqpQqGQgEKhAIACoHCAow2Nb3CjDivdcCMJ_d7gU?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
BlackRock is the world's biggest asset manager, with over $7 trillion in assets, and something big just happened in regards to its climate change influence.
CNBC <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMNjW9wow4r3XAg?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

We Need to Tackle the Carbon Emissions of the Wealthy, New Report Says <https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEFDJiRn38OBAvUJyZ0OnvRkqFwgEKg4IACoGCAowis8wMLmCBjCfodQD?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>
European Union climate policy has to address massive inequality in carbon emissions and do more to target the emissions of wealthy citizens, argues a new ...
VICE <https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBggKMIrPMDC5ggY?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen>

UN: World's wealthy must reduce carbon footprints by factor of ...www.axios.com › ... › Climate change <https://www.axios.com/united-nations-paris-agreement-global-warming-1c84f6cc-6714-43ef-a723-9043fbd7c051.html>
The wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to help ...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“The most penetrating criticism I’ve seen of renewable energy—such as wind,  solar, hydropower, hydrogen and long-life battery technology— is that it’s being promoted at massive scale to reassure us that we can go on as before, with little if any change of lifestyle, no move beyond our comfort zones. That’s a comforting view, one that we’d all love to be true. And yet, it raises a big and uncomfortable question. Can we mine, baby, mine, to ensure no reduction of living standards, no uncomfortable change of lifestyle?”  

Lance Olsen
here, where the editor published it as I wrote it and the mistakes are all mine
<<https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/21/renewable-energy-the-switch-from-drill-baby-drill-to-mine-baby-mine/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/21/renewable-energy-the-switch-from-drill-baby-drill-to-mine-baby-mine/>>>  

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining

Excerpt

Payal Sampat, the mining director at Earthworks, said recycling and technological innovation could go a long way toward reducing the demand for rare metals, but cautioned that still more needs to be done. “We’re not going to tech fix our way out of this,” she said. “It’s going to require more meaningful policy changes that fundamentally reduce the overall demand.”

<<https://grist.org/article/report-going-100-renewable-power-means-a-lot-of-dirty-mining/ <https://grist.org/article/report-going-100-renewable-power-means-a-lot-of-dirty-mining/>>>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20201214/e038787d/attachment.html>