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Gregor Gross's avatar

I wonder about something else: all mining is done with fossil fuels. All regenerative energy is helped by fossil fuels, for instance for building, maintaining, transport, which is done with cars, trains etc. None of these are yet electric and so on. So it's not either, but both in any case.

Also: don't forget Jevons Paradox: the more efficiently we do something, the more we do it. Instead of doing it less to achieve at the same output, we do even more and have even more output. So since we started to move into "regenerative energy" we have INCREASED our consumption of fossil energy as well.

Also, what about EROI ( ➜ energy return on (energy) invested): in mining for whatever, we get less and less back because the deposits are harder to come by. If we fall under certain EROI aggregate sum for our society energy needs, we'll not be able to maintain our current level of consuming, as being said in "How everything can collapse" by Savigny/Stevens.

There is no point around us, individually and as a society, starting to decrease our (energy) consumption. I see no sign of that, not even a discussion beginning.

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Tim Parsons's avatar

Is oil and gas extraction a legitimate comparison with ore extraction? While the total material requirements go down, with oil and gas there is a far lower geological 'disruption' than with mining extraction. I am making the assumption that once oil and gas is extracted, the remaining geological 'voids' have no significant detrimental impacts - and in reality isn't it the geological impact that needs to be measured, rather than the total material requirements? Obviously coal is different, but does the conclusion that low-carbon electricity will reduce material requirements still stand up if we remove oil and gas from the calculation?

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