The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[sendler]

The free market doesn't work. Every year 1% of the world population runs off with 78% of the new wealth. And for what? to squander it at the expense of future generations.
And these are the best of times. With no growth there is no investment. No free market investor is going to invest in something that loses 10% every year. But we still need to build out a whole new way of life after fossil fuel.
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Once increasing access to energy turns the corner, and GDP enters perpetual de-growth, the creationist money system we have been using for the last 50 years will collapse under a burden of debt interest that has nothing to repay it.
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For all Americans under the 70th percentile of annual income, growth has been over for 20 years due to globalization.

[freebeard]

Streamline housing.

Peoples's thoughts are the only thing that stands in the way of any change.
That. And physics and math.

Which are of course construct of thought. It easy to wind up chasing your epistemological tail.

Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap"

Cut the crap in half and your down to 55%.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by sendler

But it even more important to realize that it is impossible to even come close to replacing liquid fuel with rebuildables for heavy mining, farming, infrastructure build out and repair ect.

Lets fact check that.
https://www.idtechex.com/research/re...028-000574.asp

Electric vehicles for construction, agriculture and mining will be a $87 billion market in 2028. Komatsu, John Deere, Caterpillar, and others manufacture the big vehicles - mainly hybrid - while other manufacturers offer smaller, pure-electric versions.

https://www.equipmentworld.com/tag/e...ion-equipment/

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/30...k-development/

https://www.farm-equipment.com/artic...-farm-vehicles

Industry experts discussing electic and hybrid equipment:
Are Off-Highway Equipment and Heavy-Duty Trucks Going All-Electric? | Machine Design

Certainly the industry thinks it can be done and is working very hard to make it happen.

Heavy equipment generally stays more or less in one location.
They have to deal with enormous forces rather than power (= force times distance).
Electric motors are perfect for that.
That's why many heavy construction vehicles don't use their engines to drive it directly; instead they solely power a generator to drive electric motors and hydraulic pumps.
As batteries improve and fuel price and environmental concerns rise we'll see many of those engine generators get replaced by battery packs.

One interesting feature is the trend of using relocatable PV panel grids and wind farms at remote giant open mines.
It is often more expensive to transport diesel there than its purchase price, and the mines operate for decades on end, so not having to move the energy source in is an even bigger asset there than in urban, more accessible locations.
High altitude (> 4000 m) equipment already is mostly electric anyway.

Rather than impossible to even come close, we're well underway.

[sendler]

Pleas try to aquaint yourself with the scale of our oil consumption.
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A hundred...million...barrels... a day
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Stored electricity is very difuse. Diesel fuel is very dense energy. 1 gallon can do the work of 10 kWh of electricity in an industrial machine at 35%, weighs 7 pounds, and costs $4.
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Fossil fuel borders on magic.
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Farm machines use 570 Liters of diesel per day = 5,700 kWh per day. Even if you cut that by2.5 for the extra efficiency of electric motors with round trip losses you get 2,300 kWh per day for a large size farm machine. 12 Tesla grid scale 200kWh powerpacks per day to hot swap in and out. for just one tractor. We are going to need to start making some mighty long extension cords to get all of this energy around. Food pricing will skyrocket in lock step with oil price in 20-30 years.
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2.5 miles across and .75 miles deep. Mining copper at .2% ore grade. The earth movers carry 250 tons/ trip. 1 truck at 10 mph versus 3,400 donkeys at 2 mph. Anyone should be able to understand that once diesel fuel begins to leave us, we won't be able to ever again undertake big projects like this.
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Human civilization will be much smaller and simpler again. After the age of fossil fuel.
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[RedDevil]

Your point was one can't even come close to ever replacing liquid fuel for heavy equipment.
I gave you the links that prove otherwise.
Citing total oil consumption is just a way of diverting the issue. Only a very small part of it is used for this kind of heavy equipment.

Since you were referring to earth movers:
https://www.forconstructionpros.com/...er-fuel-prices

Advanced Powertrains Generate ROI Even When Fuel Prices Trend Lower
The focus for advanced powertrains and hybrid drive systems in today's construction equipment looks beyond fuel economy to increased performance and ease of operation.

You said donkeys? Why did you bring them up?
Hybrid and electric systems will replace fossil fuel systems because they are flat out better suited for the job.

Anyway...
https://www.quora.com/How-much-oil-i...y-in-the-world

25,739,700,000 lbs or 11,699,863,636 kg is the weight of the oil extracted from the ground each day!! 26 billion pounds! ...

Now a barrel contains about 127 kg of oil. So the global daily oil production is only about 93 million barrels a day.
The difference is 7 million barrels daily, way more than all the heavy equipment in the world combined uses. Problem solved

[oil pan 4]

Just remember all cost gets passed down to the end user/consumer.
So when fuel or whatever sort of mobile power the farming machinery uses becomes unaffordable what do we think will happen to the food prices?

[RedDevil]

I hope we don't have to wait for the price of oil to rise to dramatic levels before we can replace that kind of machinery?

Anyway, the price trend for solar panels and batteries is downwards. There will be a tipping point where it becomes the way to go. It may be different for each application and situation, but gradually more and more systems will be converted.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

Anyway, the price trend for solar panels and batteries is downwards. There will be a tipping point where it becomes the way to go. It may be different for each application and situation, but gradually more and more systems will be converted.

It is a false hope that we could ever replace all energy with solar and wind. There is not enough raw materials to possibly build out this much hardware.
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One more time (one by one it seems). Just for the USA:
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130,000 square miles of area, 1.000.000 2.5MW class wind turbines, and 50,000 SolarStar class grid scale 500MW solar farms, and 70,000,000 rooftop solar systems, and a 4% increase in hydro with the new capacity capable to pump store. And an unrealistic quantity of this as split Hydrogen with a new fleet of long haul transport. And still very little percent of storage. Please review "Roadmap to Nowhere" to see the explanation of the facts and figures. They actually did the math.
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The Myth of Powering the Nation With Renewable Energy
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[RedDevil]

That simply isn't true. No matter how often you repeat it.
It is 100% opinionated nuclear propaganda.

I wonder why. They should not fight each other. We'll need both nuclear and renewable at full swing for the coming 5 decades or more.

[sendler]

In what way do you find it to be untrue? The totals were taken from the SolutionsProject.org which all renewable advocates constantly quote as the go to guide to replacing all energy in the USA with wind, water, and solar. The Roadmap To Nowhere simply added up the hardware that is required in order to generate the required energy, and gave every benefit of the doubt every where they could regarding optimistic efficiency gains of electric vs ICE, capacity factor, land use, and price.
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1.5TeraWatts of continuous average power must be replaced just for the USA which already inludes the efficiency advantages of electric over ICE. With capacity factors as stated (25% for solar and 33% for wind?) The hardware requirements are as previously stated.
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And this doesn't even get into the hardware that needs to be built on the consume end of the transition, which is likewise impossible to build that many batteries. Just for the USA. Now envision the whole world making the same transition. Along with underdeveloped countries raising their standard of living so that they no longer have to cook using sticks or poop outside in the yard.
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It doesn't add up.
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The future will be much smaller and simpler.
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The sooner we accept this and quit relying on a false hope of rebuildables replacing 17 TW, the sooner we can make plans on how to get there as humanely as possible.