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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no.

The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term supply problem without asking what other sources might be discovered.

From the article A lithium-ion car battery with a 100 kg cathode requires 6–12 kg of cobalt and 36–48 kg of nickel so work on 10kg without improvements and same article says at current economic models only 10 exp 8 tonnes economically extractable. So 10 exp 10 batteries. (1000 kg per tonne) 10,000,000,000 batteries. One car for everyone alive... And that's before normal levels of production efficiency, scavenging nice cobalt rich sources like old batteries or even the intent of the article: new sources and new technologies.

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Exactly right. But it makes for a catchy title doesn't it? And if you're research lab is working on anodes for batteries you need to pitch urgency to get the big funding, who wants to fund research for problems that are 50 years out?

But cynicism aside, the key to making renewables a practical base load replacement for fossil fueled plants is a solid battery infrastructure. And those batteries aren't 'car batteries' they are 'city batteries'. We really do want to get to the point where energy independence is possible so continuing to improve batteries is a good thing.

It is just hard for some people to prioritize without an imminent threat of disaster.

> But cynicism aside, the key to making renewables a practical base load replacement for fossil fueled plants is a solid battery infrastructure.

No, it's a solid storage infrastructure, of which batteries are only one type.

I agree.

Where weight and size do not matter, more choices for batteries are possible.

E.g. redox flow batteries.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/its-big-and-...

In the near future, atmospheric CO2 will be recycled to create organic fuel.

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/09/18/solar-fuel-system-recyc...

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2017/Q2/instantly-r...

Solid state batteries are also interesting. Lithium-ion batteries will be replaced because they can develop dendrites and catch fire.

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324734826_Non-Tradi...

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/04/19/016213/the-slas...

> In the near future, atmospheric CO2 will be recycled to create organic fuel.

If you have unlimited free energy in this near future, then maybe you can do what yoj say (or maybe electrolysis to produce hydrogen is better/more profitable).

Otherwise no, this won't happen.

PV is growing at 30-40% per year for many years now. This year’s end-of-year forecast is 0.5 TW, extrapolating that trend gives 11.5-28.3 TW in December 2030.

IMO liquid or solid fuel at normal pressure and temperature is much cheaper and easier and safer to store than hydrogen.

Besides:

http://carbonengineering.com

http://www.climeworks.com

From https://lustysociety.org/ethics.html#climate:

Annual global fossil fuel subsidies amounting to $5.3 trillion in 2015 (6.5% of global GDP).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1...

According to the Global Carbon Atlas: 36 183 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2016.

According to estimates in 2018 by Carbon Engineering and Climeworks: The cost of capturing 1 metric ton CO2 from the air costs $ 600 in 2018 and could fall under $ 100 in 5 - 10 years. A plant could make a liter fuel for a dollar.

At a cost of $ 600 per metric ton of CO2, the capture of the emissions of 2016 (36 183 million metric tons) costs $ 21 710 billion or $ 21.7 trillion.

At a cost of $ 100 per metric ton of CO2, the capture of the emissions of 2016 (36 183 million metric tons) costs $ 3 618 billion or $ 3.6 trillion.

The organic fuel should be used with batteries and fuel cells and not with combustion engines.

In order to decrease the CO2 concentration in the environment, the waste products must be contained and recycled later without release into the atmosphere.

Hydrogen may be more energetic than a lot of stuff per unit of mass, but we shouldn't forget the tanks we need to carry it around are anything but light.

“In the near future, atmospheric CO2 will be recycled to create organic fuel”

That’s been around for quite a while already; you’re describing a tree.

--- at a rate orders of magnitude faster than trees currently do

Ah, you mean grass?

yes but... 3D printed by a neural net at Trees.com ON A BLOCKCHAIN and crowdsourced with a Kickstarter from curated ambi-sexual SanFran hipsters, avail in 5 colors for pre-order at a low low annual subscription add-on for Prime members of $79.99

I shouldn't feed the troll. But since you made me chuckle, did you mistake hckrnews for reddit maybe? :P

Australia is not utilising only 14% of their resources, they have only 14% of the known world resources. More than 50% is based on Congo were the work is performed in miserable conditions. We are all happy that we still don’t reach peak oil, but if we don’t change the way we think about progress and economic growth, in a world with finite resources will have severe consequences.

There is tons of cobalt in the world (pun intended). In Canada alone there are at least a dozen junior miners with prospects looking for capital (there's even a town called Cobalt in Ontario from a previous mining era). It's just not economic to mine at current prices. This is a non-issue and I'm disappointed Nature published this dumb article.

The question is not how many resources we have, the question is how hard they are to extract. The more resources we extract from earth the more difficult they become to extract, that is, we need to apply more resources/pollution/energy/technology to extract the same ton of cobalt that we used in the past. This turn this problem in an exponential one, I don’t know when we will need to face it but I understand the concern of Nature (pun intended).

Is your comment to say that cobalt should simply be more expensive to compensate for the negative externalities of obtaining it?

I think he's saying that eventually we will run out of economically viable to extract resources and we should start planning for that now. I'm not quite so sure because there are still tons of people living in awful conditions and they need a lot of this resource extraction to raise their standard of living.

Many people need this resources, including our children. That’s why we need to slow down our crave for things and enjoy what we have. We don’t need to change cars every 4 year, we don’t need to commute as we do, we don’t need all the clothes, we don’t need to eat meat at every meal. Also we don’t need to work in useless jobs only to have money to buy useless things. We need to reconnect with nature and with each other.

I agree that the consumption isn't sustainable long term. At the same time, consumption of clothes, food, household goods, etc. in rich countries helped China to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by giving them better paying manufacturing jobs.

Lol

People here really misunderstand and misapply the concept of economically viable to extract.

As cheaper sources are exhausted, the more expensive ones become viable. So we won't run out on the projected time horizon.

The main reason why US and Australian rare earth production has gone away is because Chinese sources are so much cheaper (aka no pollution or safety regs). No production, no exploration, and no development of rare earth sources.

As cheap production goes away, people again look for, build, and use other sources.

Resource extraction under capitalist, fascist or otherwise non socially minded governments has been shown to hinder growth in regions where high amounts of valuable natural resources are available since elites can leverage the low cost of labor to extract said resources.

Planning on a backup plan and providing large numbers of jobs through factories to increase the value of labor in these places is a much better way to increase the standard of living other without installing socialist governments.

Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Our "peak battery" is bounded at the product of "peak population" and per-capita battery need, both of which are fairly constrained. Not really the right analysis.

> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.

Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.

It's still very much an unsolved problem.

I would love to be proved wrong!

Edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Using current recycling methods, the lithium is not recyclable (the cobalt is). I then asked if I am not correct, to please correct me.

So if not recycled, what's currently happening to lithium batteries in all our electronics and car batteries (etc)? Is it just handled as hazardous waste?

Are you suggesting we know how to extract lithium from a random mix of many minerals, but getting it out of the used battery is beyond our capabilities? That’s not very believable.

The real issue is that, just as you hint, it’s actually cheaper to get lithium from mineral rich dirt, than to set up collection, disassembly and recovery operation for existing batteries. We can do it, it’s just not most economically efficient way to get raw lithium. If lithium goes up in price, it might become viable.

> That’s not very believable.

Can you point me to a recycling facility that's doing this?

No, because it's far cheaper to mine it. As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

> No, because it's far cheaper to mine it.

OK, question answered.

> As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

I asked about lithium recycling. How am I being fooled?

Because who cares about lithium recycling? We don't need recycled lithium to maintain battery production. Realistically it's one of those resources like iron or aluminum or phosphorous which we can't meaningfully "run out of".

(Though I threw that last one in deliberately: we're pulling P out of rocks and throwing it into the biosphere at an unsustainable rate right now, and are going to have to radically adjust the way we do agriculture fertilization in the coming decades. But even then there's going to be plenty of P around, we just have to change the sources we use to extract it.)

Because then this is pretty much a false statement:

> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.

Although they can be, they're not.

That's a big point in electric cars, that I think gets swept under the rug in the green-washing of electric cars: the main widget that makes electric cars electric cars is discarded as hazardous waste.

It's too costly and impractical to recycle them. We essentially want to replace a billion gasoline cars with electric ones, and the tech. to recycle those future billion batteries doesn't really exist.

Just a point I wanted to be cleared up.

OK. The linked article was about resource exhaustion, not "hazardous waste". My "100% recyclable" point was that the limiting resources in battery production can be sustainably sourced from old batteries, not that literally every atom was going into a new batter. I mean, one doesn't complain that the plastic housing or IC controllers aren't recyclable.

FWIW, though: Li isn't particularly hazardous.

Thanks for the discussion. I assume that those who down vote do not reply.

But I disagree that recycling is a big point regarding solar panels and batteries.

IMO lack of recycling and toxic waste are very lame and ignorant and misleading excuses (by the main stream media) to refuse the solar power industry, the battery industry and the electric car industry.

The threat and harm of climate change is catastrophic and very real and change is very urgent.

The fight against climate change must not be a debate of wrong priorities (waste vs climate change) and short term profitability of companies.

No foolish austerity and no local (and needless) poisoning by solar panels and batteries is worth the harm of climate change.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/0...

https://truthout.org/articles/release-of-arctic-methane-may-...

http://www.climate-change-emergency-medical-response.org/2-d...

http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

For more links:

https://lustysociety.org/ethics.html#climate

the tech. to recycle those future billion batteries doesn't really exist.

You're still missing the whole point, which is why you are being downvoted. The technology to recycle the future billion batteries exists today, and will improve in future. The issue here is that at a current price point it is simply not competitive compared to extracting raw lithium from ground. As the most accessible and profitable fields run out of the material, and as the demand for lithium grows, the price will go up, which might make the battery recycling economically viable.

Compare it to our current wood usage: the wood we use for furniture production is usually recyclable. You could take a wardrobe, disassemble it, and after some recutting and sanding you might use the wood for some other project. However, doing this in the end costs much more than using new materials, because collecting used furniture for recycling purposes, and labor needed to disassemble it and prepare wood for reuse is simply too much for it to be worth it, especially as it cannot be manufactured in a process as automated as making plywood, MDF, 2x4s or hardwood flooring is these days. Same with getting lithium from batteries: we could do it, but you'd have to pay extra for it.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-lithium-ion...

Not really there yet, but it's ultimately a very solvable problem: the elements are right there and in high concentrations.

> Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.

Lithium is not a limiting resource for battery production, it's actually fairly common in the earth's crust. The limit is cobalt[1].

Extracting cobalt from a junked battery is orders of magnitude cheaper than mining and smelting it from the (very diffuse) ores that are available.

[1] Also, per the article, nickel, which surprises me so much that I suspect it's wrong. Per wikipedia nickel reserves are 30x yearly production, and of course new exploration and extraction techniques are always pushing the reserve number up.

The most-recycled material in the US presently is a battery electrolyte: lead.

Reuse rate is only 68%.

That's a 32% reduction in stock per generation.

High rates of recycling are possible in theory, yes, but have not been demonstrated in practice. The loss rate over n generations for a recovery rate r (percent/100) is r^n. At a 90% recovery rate, you've lost 50% of initial stock in 7 generations.

https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/

https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/recycle/my...

Unrecycled material isn't "lost"[1]. Those batteries are still in landfills and can be recovered at least as easily as ore can be mined. Economics will fix this for us. Increase the price of lead and at some point it becomes worthwhile to scavenge those landfills for old batteries (or to use alternative battery chemistries, etc...).

[1] Though in a handful of cases it gets dispersed in a way that's very difficult to recover. I mentioned phosphorus in another post: P is being unsustainably pulled out of rocks and put into biomass, where it gets flushed into the oceans. Figuring out a way to get it back out is a far bigger mess than mere cobalt recycling is going to be. But even there economics will save us as fertilizer costs make recovery new techniques worthwhile.

It seems like the implication is that poverty in the Congo is the result of cobalt extraction. This is not supported by my understanding of the history. During the Rwandan civil war of the early 90s, Tutsi rebels with Western weapons -- rebelling against a Hutu-led genocide of Tutsis -- followed defeated Hutu factions into the Congo, ostensibly to prevent their resurgence. The resulting cross-border conflict led to the near-collapse of the Congolese government and a prolonged civil war that continues to this day.

Other countries with large resource extraction industries, such as Chile and Norway, have been able to take advantage of the profits to build their economy, thanks to their political stability. The resource curse can clearly be lifted by a suitably durable politics.

> what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply

This article is about cobalt and nickel, neither of which are rare-earths.

It's also fundamentally wrong in its headline and lede conclusion. And it even admits as much:

> Recycling cannot replenish supplies. Lithium-ion batteries last for 15–20 years, 3 times longer than the 5–7 years for lead-acid batteries. Refiners might exploit poorer quality ores, especially as prices climb. But greater processing costs would push the prices higher.

So... no. We aren't going to run out. We'll see a continuous bend in the demand curve as new production methods come online.

It's exactly the same logic that led to all the fretting about "peak oil" in the 90's and early 00's. No, all that happened (sadly) was that when gas crossed $3/gallon we suddenly invented fracking and prices stabilized.

Batteries will get more expensive. We'll survive.

Batteries might get more expensive, but if that happens then we'll see old batteries having scrap value, just like with aluminum today. People will hold onto their old batteries instead of trashing them or recycling them for free, and will re-sell them to recyclers, and recycling rates will go way up.

Just look at the recycling rates today for car batteries (lead acid): it's nearly at 100%, though of course part of that is because almost no one changes their own battery, and when they do, they do it at AutoZone in the parking lot and leave the old one there. But it's perfectly possible, especially with them retaining value, to have extremely high recycling rates for Li-ion batteries, so that the lithium, cobalt, and nickel inside never goes to waste and is continually recycled.

What we really need is better standardization for batteries for small devices, particularly phones, and elimination of the ability of devices to have non-replaceable batteries. I would actually favor a legislative approach to this: ban the selling of devices with sealed-in batteries altogether in major markets, forcing manufacturers like Apple to come up with standards and making batteries at least somewhat easily removed to facilitate recycling.

> ban the selling of devices with sealed-in batteries altogether in major markets [...] making batteries at least somewhat easily removed to facilitate recycling.

The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.

Putting batteries non-removably inside devices makes them much more likely to be recycled, along with the rest of the recyclable components of the device.

>The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.

Right now, that may be the case, but that's because those batteries generally have zero scrap value, so you're just hoping users will care enough about the environment to not do this, and take them to a proper recycling bin (like at the entrance to Target).

But the parent was predicting that batteries would become significantly more expensive as these materials became more scarce. In that future, a dead phone battery would still have some value, so people would generally want to take them someplace where they can get money back for them.

The other factor is that, in this possible future of expensive batteries, it'd be much more important for them to be standardized and more easily replaced. If your phone costs $500 sans battery, but the battery for it is another $500, you're going to want a standardized design that you can swap between different phones or other devices.

CPUs, cases, screens, memory chips, radios, antennae...none of the other parts of phones are standardized or swappable, and unlike batteries they are already expensive. Why would batteries suddenly behave differently when they become expensive?

None of those things retain much value after years of use: they become obsolete, and they can't be recycled.

> The opposite is true; removable batteries almost entirely end up in landfills.

That's because they have near-zero value, the component elements still being much cheaper to produce from ore than from recycling. That flips around once we start running out of ore.

Basically, economics takes care of this for us. At the end of the day, battery reagents are unconsumed resources, so we'll be fine (at some price equilibrium probably higher than their price today) so long as the number of people and their need for power storage remains bounded.

Lead acid batteries are basically worthless though.

There's a $12 deposit (core charge) you pay if you don't exchange one, which drives recycling, plus stores and landfills tend to accept them for free.

>Car manufacturers and governments project that 10 million to 20 million electric cars will be produced each year by 2025. If each car battery requires 10 kg of cobalt, by 2025, electric vehicles would need 100,000–200,000 tonnes of cobalt per year — most of the world’s current production. Similarly, 400,000–800,000 tonnes of nickel would be required annually, or 20–40% of all the metal used today. More would be needed when trucks, buses, aeroplanes and ships become battery-powered.

By 2050, producing 50 million to 80 million electric vehicles a year would require 500,000–800,000 tonnes of cobalt. Beyond 2030, this would far exceed current mining capacities. Similarly, 2–3 times more nickel would be needed by 2050. Nickel shortages would be evident by the mid-2030s.

Like Oil, there is enough oil on earth should we need to continue to growth not using any renewable energy for the next 100 years or more. The problem is somewhere down the line it may not be $100 per barrel but likely be $200+.

The same is lithium, there are still huge known reserve. But key here is economically variable reserve. The reason Australia aren't doing much of it is because they cant complete with Congo with when the lithium price is $80 without much profit.

Once the price reach high enough, it is for certain someone else will come and do the dirty work. And I expect lots of investment coming from China.

Another point the article missed: although batteries have a lifetime of 15-20 years (which they claim makes recycling infeasible), most people currently replace their cars far more frequently than that. Which means that either the cars will be scrapped and the battery materials recycled (if they really are all that valuable), or the global production of cars per capita will slow as people keep their cars for the lifetime of the batteries.

Most cars today are scraped because the body wears out, not because the engine fails. Of course if you are reading this you probably trade in your car much sooner, and send it on down the line to poorer and poorer people, eventually the car ends up in Mexico/Central America (US/Canada), or Africa (Europe), where they keep it running until it is ~20 years old and the body fails. You probably are more ware of engine failures because you don't have any experience with a car that actually wears out, only cars where there is either premature engine failure, or is in an accident.

The only reason 15 year batteries are not recyclable are it will be 15 years before current cars get old enough to need that infrastructure. There is plenty of money to be made if you want to invest in recycling them, but you need to invest at the right time. You probably should be thinking about recycling in Central America or Africa (consider political issues before investing!), and make sure you don't over invest, lead acid batteries fundamentally need twice as much infrastructure because they are replaced twice as often.

> where they keep it running until it is ~20 years old

I've seen lots of cars in Morocco that were more like ~30... maybe the dry air helps reducing wear, I don't know. My 10-year-old Corsa in England was starting to rust pretty bad, it wouldn't have lasted another decade for sure.

>Of course if you are reading this you probably trade in your car much sooner, and send it on down the line to poorer and poorer people, eventually the car ends up in Mexico/Central America (US/Canada), or Africa (Europe), where they keep it running until it is ~20 years old and the body fails.

Which is why the brands of cars less wealthy people buy are over-represented in the 15-25yo age group on US roads compared to when they were newer. All the stuff rich people buy get traded in, auctioned and (mostly) shipped to Central America. The stuff less well of people buy sticks around because they get private party sold to the next guy and the next guy and the next guy. You'll have an easier time finding early '00 Hyundai parts than early '00 Honda parts.

Is Honda a luxury brand? There are fewer of them sold than Hyundais (I'm not sure that was the case in 2000), but perhaps not because only wealthy people buy them?

The buyer who could afford a 2002 CRV in 2002 is more likely to be the kind of buyer who trades it in in 2008 for the updated body style (and every trade in is an opportunity for the car to be sold overseas).

There's plenty of CRVs and SantaFes on the road but the present market share of the 2002 SantaFe has increased relative to the market share of 2002 CRVs when compared to what the situation was in 2005 or so.

We're obviously talking at a statistical, not individual level here. Of course not only wealthy people buy Hondas, just more wealthy people buy Hondas than Kias and wealthy people are more likely to trade in their old car at a dealer which makes it more likely to wind up overseas (if it's got too many miles to easily resell in the US).

Most people replace their new cars within 10 years, but those cars are sold to second owners rather than being scrapped.

The average age of a car in the US is ~12 years has been on an upward trend for a long time.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/09/f37/fotw%239...

> The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14%

That is incorrect. The article states that Australia has 14% of the world's cobalt reserves, and does not specify their utilisation.

Humans are inherently irresponsible with their given resources.

I personally find our waste, specifically with batteries, pretty disgusting.

What would be interesting would be for batteries to be treated as a national resource, where you basically check them out and need to return them when they are finished.

I also think it would be interesting to require that certain products, specifically everything related to connecting a device to the power grid, should all be standardized and regulated.

The amount of waste in batteries, power cords, USB cords etc - just seems unsustainable. I am sure most would disagree with me, but I find all this product/design/resource waste to be evidence of lazy and disturbingly poor engineering.

I look at a particular video of Apple's as a true marker of the level of their engineering prowess (lack of):

There is a video showing the ridiculously complex method for battery replacement in the iPhoneX - requiring a many stepped procedure and a battery-tamping-device that was obviously contract manufactured by a small-ish shop for their genius' use.

I just find that with the amount of time, effort and resources put into the design development and production of all apple products (just as a singular example among many many companies) to illustrate their lack of full competence in sustainability in their products. Sure, they may reduce waste in many areas as compared to the old way, or others, but there is still a CRAP ton of waste across the board.

/rant

>A lithium-ion car battery with a 100 kg cathode requires 6–12 kg of cobalt and 36–48 kg of nickel

The wording here is also really awkward, and shows how little the author actually knows about batteries. There is no Li-ion battery in the world with a "100kg cathode". There may be 100kg of cathode material used in within the cells of a battery pack, but to say "100kg cathode" is just flat out wrong and makes me question this entire analysis.

Indeed. It is quite odd (perhaps to the point of being misleading) to use scientific notation ahead of "tonnes of kg", instead of just using scientific notation combined with Kg.

I made this mistake reading the article–I divided 10^7 / 10kg per car --> only enough cobalt for about 10^6 cars (1 000 000) cars.

Instead the calculation is 10^7 tonnes * 10^3 kg/tonne = 10^10 kg / 10kg per car = enough cobalt for 10^9 battery packs = 1 billion cars.

I think we will be ok...

Still, it's a finite resource and we consume it more and more. Obligatory link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=list_other&list=SP6A1FD1...

IMO Thorium reactors are too late. In some decades, there will be enough solar power, wind power and fusion power anyway.

But there is enough Uranium and Thorium for many centuries, even millennia.

The most important problem to solve is climate change; besides aging as the most important reason for misery and death today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6HyNk5Duvk

This is probably true, but they should still be researched in case they become useful in other settings, e.g. Mars, or even places on Earth with poor renewable energy potential

A big problem with Mars is that getting fuel there is expensive, they sometimes have large dust storms, and their atmosphere is very thin. Solar power would work fine there 90+% of the time, but outside of fission, there doesn't seem to be any good technology for powering a human habitat over long periods. A rich thorium deposit on Mars could go a long way in creating a self-sustainable habitat. Some thorium reactor designs are notable for their high inherent safety, which is probably a big concern for any human habitat on Mars for morale reasons (think about how much a fatal nuclear disaster on a Martian colony would scare people about space exploration)

I agree.

But going to Mars in the next decades is a useless horrific suicide mission that only serves to make a few people famous.

IMO persons will colonize moons, planets and space ships once their biological body is replaced by a machine body. In a biological sense, the human race will die on Earth.

I agree that focusing on Mars soon is useless, but in the near-term Thorium could be useful for non-windy locations near the poles.

I think people are underestimating the amount of energy production required for sustainability. We use fossil fuels in many other applications besides turning into combustion fuels and if we want to start scrubbing CO2 so we don't turn into Venus that is even more energy. Take fertilizer production for example, we already know it is an energy intensive proccess, a large portion of global energy supply is used on making fertilizer, but it goes farther than that. The base reagents we turn into solid or liquid synthetic fertilizer is more fossil fuels which doesn't get accounted for as energy production, yet it is containing a ton of energy still. We could draw what we need for the fertilizer from the atmosphere and water, but it will increase our energy expenditures for production an entire order of magnitude higher, if not more. Who is counting the carbon pollution from that fertilizer after it comes out of my ass or rots on the ground? The same goes with other processes and materials. Plastics is a big one, nobody counts the amount of 'energy' stored within plastic as a material, plastic doesn't easily degrade, but it does degrade and release its decomposition products into the earth and atmosphere, and at increasing rates if we take the reports of plastic-consuming bacteria evolving and gaining numbers seriously.

I do not know about the effects of plastic decomposition on the climate.

But the replacement of animal products by vegan food is the only sane choice for medical, ethical, economic and ecological reasons.

http://www.cowspiracy.com/

http://www.whatthehealthfilm.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/vid...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/vid...

The article says that Australia has 14% of global reserves not that they're only mining 14% of what they have. We've also found all the easy stuff already, the cost of exploration will only increase over time since the good stuff will be deeper or in more random places.

Thus begins the "peak s/oil/cobalt" soothsaying for the next 10 decades or so?

That doesn't seem like an alas situation

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