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Comment by miduil | Hacker News Reader

Reading through this makes me realize that I wonder what will come after "energy wars"? Like if around ~2040-2050 almost 100% of electricity demand is hopefully renewable, that means a completely new area of power.

Till then, fossil energy has been the strongest dominator on which establishment is holding power - once that's becoming the past - what will happen on the world table?

Of course, mining etc. is part of the answer; but I feel like there is much more flexibility around working around refined material availability, than it is with access to energy to start with. Also, contrary to Energy, almost anything that's mined will stay in recyclable economy - so the dominance/control one country can exercise is limited.

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If you assume the rosiest scenario: a linear rampdown of _all_ emissions (not just from electricity generation) to zero by 2040, we still blow post our carbon budget to stay below 1.5C warming: 42 Gt/yr * (15 years / 2) = 315 Gt (compared to our "remaining balance" of 170 GtCO2 before >50% of 1.5C warming). Needless to say even this optimistic scenario has no chance of happening.

So the answer is that for your children, wars of imperialism will be replaced by wars for water, arable land, fisheries, etc. along with varying levels of violence that will meet the mass migration of refugees. How bad it will be will depend.

Right, that's what is next :(

Unfortunately, some of the convertors for électrification depend on minerals which, if not "rare", are unevenly distributed.

That leave plenty of room for "battery wars", "motor wars", Even "solar panel" wars if we need to.

I do not believe Putin and Trump are eying Dumbass and Groenland only because of the scenery - and the general historical lesson of the 2020s is that brute force _is_ worth it.

China only is self sufficient, as far as I understand it.

Europe could use minerals from its soil, if we accepted mining. But we don't want that either, any more. (And given what is about to happen to Groenland, it may be a blessing in disguise not to be too resource-rich. Again: pray the Emperor may ignore you.)

Funnily enough, one of the big reasons for Ukraine invasion was to block our gas extraction, it happened right after Shell did a discovery research on the Donbass, and for many years the occupation had been contained precisely to the two regions where Ukraine had some deposits - Donbass and Black Sea. It's only later mental decline caused him to expand the attack.

And vice versa, while there are some rare earths in the Donbass, they are not very convenient to extract. Trump's mining deal was more like throwing a useless toy to a kid throwing a tantrum. It's notable that no one even remembers that "deal" lately.

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