Astonishingly, you managed to reply without mentioning me, or anything I'd said. Without this...

that Magna energy you believe will save our asses will not fuel our cars, — Athena

I would not have known this was a response to my post. How prevelent do you imagine your mindset is; one I'd describe as "maliciously courting disaster" - to the point where you seem quite annoyed that genocide is not the only solution? Where are the better angels of your nature?

Most geothermal energy today is hydrothermal - tapping into underground bodies of hot water. It is not the same as magma energy. The significant passage is highlighted in bold:


Status of the Magma Energy Project
Dunn, J. C.
Abstract
The current magma energy project is assessing the engineering feasibility of extracting thermal energy directly from crustal magma bodies. The estimated size of the U.S. resource (50,000 to 500,000 quads) suggests a considerable potential impact on future power generation. In a previous seven-year study, we concluded that there are no insurmountable barriers that would invalidate the magma energy concept. Several concepts for drilling, energy extraction, and materials survivability were successfully demonstrated in Kilauea Iki lava lake, Hawaii. The present program is addressing the engineering design problems associated with accessing magma bodies and extracting thermal energy for power generation. The normal stages for development of a geothermal resource are being investigated: exploration, drilling and completions, production, and surface power plant design. Current status of the engineering program and future plans are described.
Publication:
Presented at the Symposium on Geothermal Energy, New Orleans, La., 10 Jan. 1988

Hydrothermal draws on temperatures rarely exceeding 250'C. Magma is 1200'C. Hydrothermal bodies of underground water have a "replacement rate" problem. They cool down as energy is extracted from them, and take time to heat up again. Magma energy does not have this replacement rate problem.

What if the magma lies too deep?

What if the magma lies too deep? — Cornwell1

Most magma is beyond reach, but there are what NASA calls 'crustal magma bodies' - and I call magma chambers, within 1-2km of the surface. The deepest bore hole ever is the Kola Bore Hole in Russia - at 12km, drilled between 1965-1995. Drilling technology has continued to develop since then; as has bore lining technology. So to paraphrase NASA, I don't foresee any 'insurmountable barriers.' Not technological barriers anyway.

The real obstacles seem to be political - though it's difficult to be certian; it seems magma energy falls between two stools: right wing money grubbing fossil fuel addicted climate change denial; on the one hand, and the other, limits to resources, anti-capitalist, green commie, vegan cyclists. Maintaining capitalism with limitless clean energy, and so providing for a prosperous sustainable future is a third wheel to this dichotomy of doom, not on anyone's radar.

Things are getting too unpleasant.

Things are getting too unpleasant. — Athena

How did you notice when you've not engaged with anything I've written?

I don't think anything would convince me to believe overpopulation is not a very serious problem — Athena

...but keep insisting on de-population - while still pumping oil.

Magna energy you believe will save our asses will not fuel our cars, at least not if we don't have an energy grid for electric cars, and I don't think electric tanks are going to win wars. Another small fact, oil is sold in dollars and countries around the world hold dollars to pay for that oil and have tied their economies to the value of the dollar. — Athena

If you do not understand that it's morally wrong to blame the climate and ecological crisis on the very existence of people, while restricting viable alternate clean energy technologies to maintain a catastrophically polluting, albeit obscenely profitable fossil fuels industry, then I'll not take lessons from you on being pleasant.

It's not the energy being clean or not of course this is important insofar the atmosphere is concerned, but more important is what is done with this energy. Or even more important, the scale of use.

It's not the energy being clean or not of course this is important insofar the atmosphere is concerned, but more important is what is done with this energy. Or even more important, the scale of use. — HKpinsky

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean, but I suggested - to various politicians and media outlets at COP26, developing magma energy as a global good, specifically to tackle the climate and ecological crisis; using the power generated initially to capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle - while building generating capacity to transition sector by economic sector starting with big energy users like mining, cement, steel, agriculture, aviation, shipping etc. In this way, I believe - huge environmental gains can be made without huge upfront infrastructure costs, or politically unpopular impositions on national economies.

How did you notice when you've not engaged with anything I've written? — karl stone

You keep using insulting labels like "green commie". There are respectful people and disrespectful people. I have a preference for respectful people.

...but keep insisting on de-population - while still pumping oil.

I am strongly opposed to our dependency on oil. It has been the cause of the wars we have been in since the end of WWII. Also, our dependency on foriegn oil lead to OPEC embargoing oil to the US and a very serious recession that ruined many lives. And I read that we may have less then 40 years before we do not have enough oil to maintain this oil-based economy that all industrial nations depend on. That means All industrial economies will crash and that will be worse than the Great Depression.

If you do not understand that it's morally wrong to blame the climate and ecological crisis on the very existence of people, while restricting viable alternate clean energy technologies to maintain a catastrophically polluting, albeit obscenely profitable fossil fuels industry, then I'll not take lessons from you on being pleasant.

You have imagined a problem with my reasoning that is not so. I am not opposed to clean energy and I am not in favor of dependency on fossil fuels.

Your arguments lack an understanding of economics. When there are so many people there is not enough land for them to own property, there will be intense poverty, such as in India. Huge populations with uncontrolled growth destroy the environment if they are deer, pig, or human. Birds do not breed until they have nest. The population of predator animals increases when there is a lot of prey and decreases when the population of prey decreases. Nature stays in balance and then come humans and they throw everything out of balance.

What we have done to this planet is morally wrong.

...

The only way to secure a suatinable future is to increase and extend prosperity, and the only way to do that is to harness magma energy - to meet all our energy needs, plus, capture carbon, deslainate, irrigate and recycle. — karl stone

Get real mr. Stone! The only way out is not magma. That's letting the volcano in. The only way out is production decrease. Nature has suffered long enough under the capitalistic hammering.

Get real mr. Stone! The only way out is not magma. That's letting the volcano in. The only way out is production decrease. Nature has suffered long enough under the capitalistic hammering. — Dijkgraf

Direct contradiction is not an argument. I can only refer you to the answer I gave above.

You keep using insulting labels like "green commie". There are respectful people and disrespectful people. I have a preference for respectful people. — Athena

I give respect where it's due. If 'green commie' seems disrespectful, that's because it is. Since the 1960's the left have campaigned on environmental issues - using population and climate change to level a Marxian critique of capitalism. Rather than asking how we sustain human welfare, instead, the left have cast the sustainability crisis as a 'contradiction of capitalism' - hoping it would undermine the system. Meanwhile, communism, as an economic system has failed everywhere it has been attempted, frequently resulting in authoritarian government, corruption, widespread poverty and genocide - to which they happily turn a blind eye.

I've been worried about sustainability for a long time; and it's taken a long time to identify the right questions, and longer still to find truly adequate answers. Adopting a scientific worldview, there's realistic hope for the future. It's technologically possible to sustain a large human population - with high levels of welfare, almost indefinitely. This could be the dawn of humanity - not 2 minuets to midnight.

Your belief that there's 40 years worth of oil, and that the world is over-crowded, are common misconceptions - generated by politicised narratives. In fact, less than 2% of the landmass of the UK is built upon; yet population density is quite high by global standards. Also, there's plenty of oil, gas and coal in the ground; hundreds if not thousands of years worth. Only we cannot use it because of global warming.

Similarly, the green commie vegan cyclist crowd do not seem to understand that fossil fuels impose an energy cost on everything we do; therefore limiting what we can do. Take landfill as an example - we dump and bury waste because it's energy efficient. The cost of processing waste would be too great using scarce and expensive fossil fuel energy. Wind and solar will never provide enough energy; and if you resrict supply, the price rises. But given limitless clean energy to spend, we can recycle all waste - mince it all up, and process it for raw materials.

There are rivers that no longer reach the sea, lakes that have dried out completely - like the Aral Sea; formerely the fourth largest lake in the world. It's gone, because upstream have taken all the water, mostly to produce cotton. It takes 2600 liters of water to produce the cotton for one t-shirt. Nature cannot withstand that burden - but, with limitless clean energy, we can produce clean water to irrigate farmland, to produce cotton, food and everything else.

In short, limitless clean energy would fundamentally change our relationship to the environment. Thus, capitalism is sustainable - and sustainable capitalsim is what environmentalists should have been pushing for all along; not least because, as mentioned above, poor people tend to have larger families. Also, poor people don't care about the environment. The only way to secure a sustainable future is to increase and extend prosperity, and the only way to do that is to harness magma energy - to meet all our energy needs, plus, capture carbon, deslainate, irrigate and recycle.

I am wondering how the discussion would go if we thought the Creator manifested our reality by giving chaos order and that human activity can either maintain that order or destroy it? What if we recognized chaos as the evil that threatens us and felt responsible for causing that chaos and also for restoring order? — Athena

Coming back to the OP.

The question is: isn't life chaotic, even without the human's in picture? The environment may seem to be in order, tranquil and harmonious in the short run, but if you lengthen the time period everything is in a flux and changing. Evolution creates change, mass extinction events happen, the environment altogether changes in a huge way. The change usually is just so slow that it doesn't happen in one lifetime.

Humans want order. They want to be in control. They are happy when things are under their control. That's why peace, harmony and all that stuff needs regulation starting from self-regulation. Now it's great that in maintaining that order we would take into consideration other species than just ourselves. Yet as we still don't understand how things work, our effort in micromanagement usually just fucks up something that we didn't understand to be important. Even when we try to do the good thing, we end up messing something else badly.

It's like Western doctors going to Papua New Guinea and introducing soap to the natives. Because isn't hygiene important, yes? So once they got the natives to wash themselves with soap, many of them got nasty infections as the protective layer of dirt wasn't there to protect them from the creatures of the jungle and some died. But the natives weren't upset: they just interpreted that the Western shamans had killed those as an offering to the Gods. (This anecdote was told to my father by a Nobel-prize winner that had made his career in Papua New Guinea.)

Isn't life chaotic, even without the human's in picture? — ssu

Is this a roundabout way of saying "climate is always changing"? While nominally true, it's a climate denialist meme, that given any amount of thought, obviously does not imply that adding 45 gigatonnes of carbon to the atmosphere, year after year after year, is not also a problem.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/BF5F/production/_123119984_lauvauxmap.png

What you said is true. It is also true that in nature we can see patterns and cycles.
I was thinking of the big bang and the holy books that say in the beginning there was chaos. I don't imagine there is a human-like god who decided how to put everything together, but rather, things are as they are because this is how things interact. Among animals, there are those that are the prey those that are predators and they keep each other in balance. If anyone is out of balance two things can happen. Nature will restore the balance or the environment will be destroyed. With good intentions, we destroyed the predators and the deer destroyed the environment because they were eating the grass and shrubs faster than they could be replaced. Philosophically this is a matter of how we reason.

Just for fun, I am throwing this back to you. What might I mean by "this is a matter of how we reason"? We are pretty good at achieving our goals and why might this lead to a problem?

I give respect where it's due. — karl stone

I do not engage with disrespectful people.

Out of curiosity, I read a little more of what you said, and it makes for a much better discussion than your shortcuts. However, the issue of respect is unsolved. Dealing with disrespectful people is like feeding the trolls or mice. I do not see a benefit to encouraging disrespect.

Also, there's plenty of oil, gas and coal in the ground; hundreds if not thousands of years worth. Only we cannot use it because of global warming. — karl stone

Quick tell the oil companies what you know about that and get very rich. They will love you if you can prove yourself right.

I do not engage with disrespectful people. — Athena

Your desperate need to be validated stands in the way of learning something - or failing that, at least providing a service by being there for me to bounce my ideas off; given my quite obviously superior knowledge and intellect. I wish you well ploughing your own furrow, but if the most successful idea you're able to muster is to take offence at the descriptive term 'green commie' - I fear your journey into philosophy will be short an uneventful! Tata!