Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On this episode, environmental peacemaker and mediator Olivia Lazard joins Nate to unpack the relationship between mineral deposits, conflict-vulnerable zones, and high biodiversity areas to create interlocking risks to geopolitical and climate stability.
It is hard for most people to imagine the vast increases in the rate of consumption of practically everything that makes modern life possible. Resources appear without most of us ever thinking about how or whether the rising rates of consumption can be sustained.
Will there be enough of the minerals critical for the technology behind the so-called green energy revolution?
Any report on mineral availability that starts with “a semi-infinite deposit” should be taken with great caution – it reminds of when Julian Simon said that we have oil for “six billion years”. About this report on rare earths, I’d say that calling it “clueless” is way too kind.
This post was inspired by my participation at the ARABAL 2017 conference in Muscat, Oman to discuss the options for renewable energy integration in the aluminum industry. It addresses a seeming reluctance I encountered during the discussion to adopt RE with some initial considerations on how the industry can be transformed away from utilizing fossil inputs. It provides an overview of the industry’s products, scale and impacts, before discussing transition opportunities.
Syfy channel’s political/military thriller “The Expanse,” set hundreds of years in the future, seems eerily resonant with our own era. The two major powers of the solar system, Earth and Mars, have been locked in a cold war for decades. Exploited populations working and living in the asteroid belt–an area that supplies crucial raw materials to both empires–become the flashpoint for what could turn out to be a civilization-destroying hot war between the two imperial powers.
Declining uranium production will make it impossible to obtain a significant increase in electrical power from nuclear plants in the coming decades.
A Q&A with Ugo Bardi, author of Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet
An interpretation of the recent crisis as due to mineral scarcity.
