macdoc wrote: ↑Sun Feb 05, 2023 9:36 pm
Your article is 4 years old - try something more current.
One was from Dec 2019, the other from Dec 2022. Dated by four years, but hardly out of date or irrelevant.
No shit Sherlock! And those political issues range from Congolese holes in the ground all the way to up the food chain to manufactures and consumers.
All technology carries risk and perhaps you can propose a current alternative that will get the world off fossil fuels with a lesser impact. I'm all ears.
ALL mining has some negative impacts. It's a matter of weighing benefit versus risk.
The question is who receives the gains and benefits, and who takes or is put at risk?
Cast me as a Luddite if you wish, but I'm not opposing Green tech - I'm challenging assumptions that tech in itself is going to somehow mitigate Global Heating and magically address its human and environmental impact on all of us.
Green hydrogen has a specific definition.
, green hydrogen is the one produced with no harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Green hydrogen is made by using clean electricity from surplus renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind power, to electrolyse water.
It's not quite that straightforward. I refer you to
the video I posted a few weeks ago.
as for cobalt ....the search continues for less costly, more environmentally safe alternatives to precious metals ...there is always a tradeoff.....EV batteries are a work in progress as is the general attempt to create an industrial low carbon civilization.
And so the issue is who actually gets to decide what an acceptable trade-off is, and on what grounds? Is ongoing child exploitation and environmental degradation an acceptable trade-off for us to have access to cheap, and cheaper, resources? We can't ask the planet what it thinks about that, but we can certainly ask people at the shitty end of the deal whether they think it's an acceptable trade-off can't we? So why don't we?
How about sticking to the main point which is to get to carbon neutral....propose solutions instead offering up dated negatives.
The point was that you claimed "Green hydrogen is the perfect fuel" without really thinking what that meant or what it actually entailed. As I've already said, the development of a catalyst for producing hydrogen from sea water is interesting science, but it isn't Green in and of itself. Chiding me for not accepting a headline at face value is to miss the point.
I can understand why you become quickly bored with these kinds of challenging discussions - they're not something that can generally covered a couple of sentences. Finding effective solutions requires some serious thought about the nature of the problems, quite a bit of research, and some pretty tough self reflection. It's all too easy for us to dash off a couple of sentences with our thumbs and kid ourselves we've dealt with the issues, eh?
Let me be clear, green hydrogen isn't the solution to Global Heating, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, or the ongoing impacts, loss and damages that flow from it - just like hydrogen-based mass air transport isn't - although it may be
a part of a solution to a specific aspect of the crisis. Similarly, in this context charging me here with providing solutions assumes i) there aren't already solutions we could implement today, and ii) that I'm somehow negating the role hydrogen might yet play in a sustainable renewable energy economy. There are, and I'm not.
Nonetheless, my solutions range from individuals trying to live as carbon light as they can, to developing new approaches to infrastructure, to a refocusing of education systems around climate and sustainability across discipline (even the arts and humanities), to securing human rights and particular the rights of women and children, to the democratisation of natural resources as a truly common good, to developing community-based approaches to local climate and sustainability issues as they play out on the ground, to reassessing our species relationship to the natural environment and our evolved place in it, to a serious examination of the concept of value and how it is disproportionately accrued and hoarded by a few to the detriment of everyone, to addressing Climate Change as primarily a justice issue rather than a technocratic puzzle, to governments implementing the rapid changes in the global economy they've already committed to as part of the Paris Agreement but have done very little to honour, and much more besides.
But you could sum it up in a slogan...
I think the reason you so often get annoyed with me on these issues is simply because I actually take this shit very seriously, and yet I'm still surprised that any of that would be news to you - unless you haven't really been paying attention! We can talk about any of it whenever you like - but you'll have to drop certain assumptions you have about 'my stance' in order for those discussions to be productive.