Too much post-modern marxist magic in magma

BC

Silly title but serious subject.

As James Howard Kunstler explained in Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation non-polluting, sustainable energy is much more difficult to achieve than enthusiasts claim. The same point is made by physicist Vaclav Smils in How The World Works.

The problem is that fossil fuels are irreplaceably involved in our entire industrial establishment. Creating a completely non-fossil fueled technology is a long ways away, if even attainable. Then there is fossil fuel as feed stock for chemical manufacture. Maybe some plastics, dyes, pharmaceutical compounds, and fabrics can be made from alfalfa, but mostly it takes the hydrocarbons cooked up in the earth to turn out these products.

Post-modern gender activists have, by rhetorical sleights of hand, done away with deviance. 98% of the population is now labeled "cis-gender" (cis boom bah) and the oddball 2% is the non-binary new 'they'. "Sustainable" is the same sort of sleight of hand: recycling makes plastic sustainable; organic crops are sustainable; meat grown in vats (brains in vats, anyone?) makes meat sustainable,

Except it has not, does not, and will not.

So there is this pool of magma just waiting to be turned into immaculate electricity by nonbinary engineers. It takes a lot of steel to drill into the hot magma, never mind transfer heat to steam and turbines. How does all these steel get made? Fossil fuels, iron ore, etc--all obtained with more steel and fossil fuels. The heat extraction equipment producing the immaculate electricity won't last forever -- 30 or 40 years, and then will need to be replaced. More fossil fuels.

Oh, but we'll use hydrogen for everything, or electricity.

A lot of copper wire, steel, and other metals and chemicals will be needed to make all this work. How do we get more copper? From huge mines, gouging out mountains worth of low-content ore. People don't like big mines or the metal extraction process. Polymet wants to mine copper and nickel in northern Minnesota. It's low grade ore, but it's mostly what's available. In 99 out of 100 metal extraction facilities, local water resources are badly polluted. This mine stands to ruin actually wild wild rice growing on Indian reservations, pollute waters in a state and national park, and eventually pollute Lake Superior.

The pont is: sustainable pollution free energy is a fantasy.

I deeply wish this were not so, but it is. Feel free to comment on other post-modern fantasies that you know of.

Joshs

↪Bitter Crank

I deeply wish this were not so, but it is. Feel free to comment on other post-modern fantasies that you know of. — Bitter Crank

My only gripe is with the title of the OP. There is a tendency to lump together Marxism and postmodernism. They are not the same. In fact, postmodern philosophy was formed in part in opposition to Marxism, contrary to what people like Jordan Peterson claim.

Jackson

postmodern philosophy was formed in part in opposition to Marxism — Joshs

How, exactly?

praxis

Non-fossil energy is only a fantasy if you're demanding that our current way of life (hollow materialism) remains the same.

Albero

↪Jackson

↪Joshs

Post modernism is largely a reaction to structuralism. Marxism is structuralist and uses historical materialism as a meta narrative. Post modernism posits that meta narratives do not exist

Joshs

↪Jackson

postmodern philosophy was formed in part in opposition to Marxism
— Joshs

How, exactly? — Jackson

Marxism relies on an emancipatory meta-narrative (dialectical materialism). Postmodern deconstructs all grand meta-narratives , like the narrative of progress or thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

Joshs

↪Albero

:up:

Jackson

thesis-antithesis-synthesis — Joshs

A term by Fichte, not Hegel.

Jackson

Post modernism posits that meta narratives do not exist — Albero

Lyotard said that. Not sure who belongs to the postmodern school.

Jackson

Marxism relies on an emancipatory meta-narrative (dialectical materialism). Postmodern deconstructs all grand meta-narratives , like the narrative of progress or thesis-antithesis-synthesis. — Joshs

The idea of post-modern is first (to my knowledge) found in Hegel. Who often talks about the next period after the modern.

Joshs

↪Jackson

Lyotard said that. Not sure who belongs to the postmodern school. — Jackson

Depends who you ask. Postmodern philosophy is different from postmodern literature , architecture, etc. I would put Nietzsche, Rorty, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida , Heidegger and Butler in the category of pomo philosophy.

Jackson

I would put Nietzsche, Rorty, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida , Heidegger and Butler in this category. — Joshs

Okay, that is fair.

BC

All well and good about the sources of post modernism. What about too much magic expected of magma?

Bird-Up

Here are some thoughts I would consider:

If you look at a cross section of the Earth, the crust is extremely thin. Just a dusty skin around what is otherwise a huge nuclear reaction. It wouldn't seem very hard to imagine taking advantage of that nuclear reaction and using it to power everything we want on the surface.

It is difficult to get recycling perfect, but that doesn't mean it is impractical. For example, most of the lead in car batteries is recycled these days. Making new batteries out of old batteries. Does that mean we no longer need to mine new lead? No. But imagine how much more desperate the situation would be if we had to pull each new car battery out of the earth. The aim is to slow down significantly; even if we can't come to a complete stop yet.

There are also things like bioplastics that serve as an alternative to petroleum products.

I think it's too late to claim that renewables are impractical. We have already made enough success to show that it is beyond plausible. And even if renewables were a fantasy, are you arguing that should just hurry up and use all the finite resources? Are we in a rush to destroy ourselves? Wouldn't we still want to slow down our demise as much as possible?

jgill

A system that includes fossils, renewables, recycling is a possible answer. A bit like where we are now, but looked at as a system, not individual components in isolation. Good thread, Crank.

T Clark

All well and good about the sources of post modernism. What about too much magic expected of magma? — Bitter Crank

I remember the original discussion of this technology. It's true the original poster got a lot of skepticism, including from me, but I don't remember it being particularly harsh. He basically said that the fact that we don't drop everything else and put all our money into a potentially promising but untested new technology was a sign of stupidity or corruption. It seemed to offend him that we didn't all agree with him immediately. His obsessive and browbeating style was similar to Karl Stone's.

BC

↪Bird-Up

WELCOME to TPF.

Planning is the critical piece missing from the recycling process. Manufacturers must plan for the products entire lifespan. Don't make cars, refrigerators, or computers out of material that can not be recycled. Plan for their eventual retrieval and reprocessing. Don't make trillions of single use objects without establishing the means for their collection and reprocessing (water bottles, paper envelopes, or diapers). Individual efforts are part of the solution, but without industrial planning, we will get what we have got: a large percentage of readily recyclable materials being wasted / lost, and a lot of non-recyclable materials accumulating -- somewhere.

I'm not a chemist, but I understand that some plastics can be made from biomatter. But plastics come in a huge range of molecular structures with all sorts of extreme performance characteristics. Can you make Teflon out of ore oil?

I'm an old man, and I like plastic, just like everybody else does. Great stuff. But people lived full, meaningful, interesting lives before plastic. For instance, people used to keep food in their refrigerators in glass containers. Worked fine, until you dropped it. Very few people died as a result.

NO! We should definitely stop producing, consuming, and disposing of stuff the way we do. It's just that when you look around, there are megatons of stuff that are not going to get recycled.

BC

We are up against time. Yes, we will transition to fossil free energy eventually, because we will have used it all up--if industrial civilization lasts long enough. As Vaclav Smils explains clearly, we will have to use a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture solar, wind, and nuclear power. Once we have it all in place, we will have to replace it ever so often, because stuff wears out.

new lead — Bird-Up

Never mind lead; what about lithium, indium, lanthanum, cerium, cobalt, neodymium, samarium, europium, terbium, and dysprosium? Rare earths are critical for 'green' energy and related applications. It isn't that rare earths are necessarily rare. It's just that they don't usually appear in concentrations that make them easy to obtain.

Bird-Up

↪Bitter Crank

Thanks, I would agree with everything you said. But isn't there also a valuable continuum of progress between adequate-solution and inadequate-solution?

If you are making the point that people are overestimating their ability to manage resources; I would also agree to that. It's more about feeling like we have a solution than actually having a solution. Maybe that is a sort of crude coping mechanism for dealing with the intimidation of the situation we find ourselves in: make a little progress, deny reality. Make a little more progress the next day, deny reality again. It's hard to acknowledge the scope of the situation without getting frustrated.

T Clark

We are up against time. Yes, we will transition to fossil free energy eventually, because we will have used it all up--if industrial civilization lasts long enough. — Bitter Crank

For as long as I've been alive, people have said that conservation and non-fossil energy will never replace fossil fuels. Batteries will never be efficient enough to allow widespread use of electric cars. Obviously, many of those people have vested interests in the fossil fuel industry. Then along comes Elon Musk and says "fuck that" and changes the energy landscape in a decade.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying we've never really tried. It's been an uphill battle against financial and regional political interests. Republicans will lie about climate change the same way they have lied about the 2020 election. They'd rather drive the world off a cliff than admit there is a cliff we should avoid driving off.

Hanover

To begin with, fossil fuel extraction and its wide spread use is a miracle of modern science and economic ingenuity unimaginable just 150 years ago, a mere flash in pan of human existence. What we fear today is our inability to maintain our current success. Our failure isn't in what we have done, but it's in our inability to figure out how to keep doing it forever. We fear we'll have to live as we did for the 1000s of years before we had all the riches deriveable from the soil.

Judging from our past successes, I'd bet on our future success. I have no idea what 150 years from today will look like, but I imagine it'll be as different as it was 150 years ago. Whether that will be harnessing the power of magma, the sun, hydrogen, the ebb and flow of the tides, or the spinning of the planets, who knows?

As to magma specifically, or any particular solution, such is not a philosophical question, but entirely empirical, and I'd be completely uninterested in anyone's thoughts other than an actual scientist with actual data and some evidence based proof. I remain skeptical of magma not because I think it's impossible, but because it's not been shown doable in a large scale way.

Agent Smith

There's more than one way to skin a cat. The solution to the fossil fuel catastrophe (imminent or already in progress) isn't necessarily finding an alternative greener energy source; we could simply slow down/scale down the use of coal/gas/gasoline so that the planet's natural $CO_2$ scrubbing mechanisms can work their magic.

Plus, the problem isn't technology per se; as the saying goes a bad workman blames his tools - there's no point in buying or inventing new tools so long as human nature doesn't change (take away a psychopath's gun and s/he'll still kill...with a knife probably).

Off topic? :snicker:

BC

↪Hanover

I like Vaclav Smil's book -- How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going 2022. For example, he shows how much energy it takes to manufacture a windmill and turbine, for instance, how much energy it will capture, and how long it will last (on average). It isn't that windmills are a bad idea, they just don't provide carbon free energy. Or a nice red greenhouse grown tomato has about 5 tablespoons of diesel fuel embedded in it, figuring all the inputs and distribution. Nothing wrong with hothouse tomatoes; they are just not carbon free.

Smils is a physicist, now retired from the University of Manitoba, and doesn't come down hard on either side of the global warming debate. Rather he shows what is physically possible, what is physically unlikely, and what can not work at all. He's an exceptionally clear writer, very accessible.

"[It is] reassuring to read an author so impervious to rhetorical fashion and so eager to champion uncertainty. . . Smil’s book is at its essence a plea for agnosticism, and, believe it or not, humility — the rarest earth metal of all. His most valuable declarations concern the impossibility of acting with perfect foresight. Living with uncertainty, after all, “remains the essence of the human condition.” Even under the most optimistic scenario, the future will not resemble the past. "—The New York Times"

BC

↪Agent Smith

We certainly could slow down the rate at which we produce and consume, allowing nature to catch up on carbon renewal. Unfortunately, even if we did that, global warming would continue for a considerable period of time.

The idea of slowing down production and consumption sounds good, until we consider the severe consequences awaiting. Slamming the brakes on production/consumption will bring about a world-wide depression of great severity. The world's economy simply can not turn on a dime.

There are many ideas like yours which directly address the problem (say, let's all live like it was 1890). The problem is that radical shifts in production / consumption will cause the sort of horrendous catastrophe in the short term that global warming will produce in the slightly longer term,

What does this mean? I think it means we're screwed. It's like this: if you are in the way of an oncoming disaster -- flood, forest fire, category 6 hurricane, a dozen tornadoes, poisonous toads falling from the sky-- whatever, it's too late to do anything about it. You must either flee or perish, maybe perish even I you do flee.

Of course we should keep working diligently towards solutions, but keeping it in mind somewhere between our ears, that there is no magic solution where everything turns out just perfectly.

Agent Smith

↪Bitter Crank

Hear! Hear!

Yep, it appears we've been asleep at the wheel. Someone, there were nearly 4 billion of us on the planet back when we could've taken some preventive steps (1800s - 1900s), should have seen this coming and raised the alarm.

People are still optimistic though. "We still have time to act!" is a refrain I've heard more often than I could care to count. Well, like this person once said to his toddler "we can do this the easy way or the hard way."

BC

(1800s - 1900s), — Agent Smith

In 1960 the world population was 3 billion. At that time, there was, already, some concern about CO2 among expert circles, and there was concern about population. Yes, we could have done more 60 years ago, assuming that the 3 billion free-agent humans were willing to forego what they thought was material progress, what they thought was the right thing to do.

We are not good at planning for long-term consequences. Young people tend not to think usefully about what it will be like when they are old, even though old age is only a few decades away. Once they are around 50, old age becomes a more cogent concern. People alive in 2022 can not usually think very usefully about 2050 or 2060, never mind 2100. It's too distant. 2030 is close enough to worry about,

Were we skilled at predicting and planning for events 50 to 100 years out, we would conduct our collective affairs differently. But we are not.

Agent Smith

↪Bitter Crank

Scope Insensitivity

Scope insensitivity influences how bad people consider the extinction of the human race to be. For example, when people are motivated to donate money to altruistic causes, the quantity they are willing to give does not increase linearly with the magnitude of the issue: people are roughly as willing to prevent the deaths of 200,000 or 2,000 birds.[28] Similarly, people are often more concerned about threats to individuals than to larger groups. — Wikipedia

The time scales involved are too large for people to fully grasp the magnitude of problems like global warming which has taken roughly 2 centuries to manifest in the small ways it does today.

Someone should try and put our predicament into perspective, like how astronomers did in cosmology (re Cosmic Calendar & Geologic Calendar)

A variation of this analogy instead compresses Earth's 4.6 billion year-old history into a single day: While the Earth still forms at midnight, and the present day is also represented by midnight, the first life on Earth would appear at 4:00 am, dinosaurs would appear at 10:00 pm, the first flowers 10:30 pm, the first primates 11:30 pm, and modern humans would not appear until the last two seconds of 11:59 pm. — Wikipedia

I'd say we're a fraction of a second away from disaster!

We have time! Pffft! :snicker:

karl stone

....

god must be atheist

We can reconstruct any energy form from any energy form. We can build fossil fuel from burnt fossil fuel by using energy from nuclear reactions, or from magma or anything.

C+O2-> CO2 + energy
is fully reversible by
CO2 - energy = C+ O2.

Whining stopped. (Whinging in American.)

Recycling will be an archaic form of reusing by altering.

Nore whining stopped.

Eventually (in a few billions of trillion years) all this will be stopped due to heat entropy, but hey.

BC

↪karl stone

Magma seems like a fine source of energy to me, at least where it is accessible. The Pacific Ocean is surrounded by a ring of volcanic activity related to continental subduction and ocean floor spreading, I'm not sure where it is, and is not, accessible. I suppose there are limits o how deep a access pipe can go.

So, drill baby drill.

BC

Eventually (in a few billions of trillion years) all this will be stopped due to heat entropy, but hey. — god must be atheist

We won't have to wait for a flat-out frosted cosmos to (paradoxical phrased) cook our goose. Long before the last erg of heat is given up, the sun will have expanded to envelop the earth within itself. The planet will survive as a cinder.

Long before the sun fries us, it is likely, under the best of circumstances, that we will have run our evolutionary course into the ground.

Long before we have run ourselves into oblivion, we may have spoiled the earth to a degree that we will have all died off.

Not to leave a disasteroid crashing into earth off the list.

Too much post-modern marxist magic in magma

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