September 07 2020
Happy Labor Day 2020.  The Labor movement is largely dead in the
US but everyone still likes to cap off the Summer with the Labor
Day weekend.  Any Wobblies are most likely due to over-imbibing.

Just finished James Kunstler's 'Living in the Long Emergency', a
followup of sorts to a previous book of his with a similar title.
I've sort of soured on Kunstler due to his right wing pontificating
via his blog.  For a guy who loves to remind people that he's still
a registered Democrat he sure sounds like a Trump supporter.
Nonetheless, I'll still write up a review of the book since much
of it is apolitical and relevant.

In the interim, maybe spend a short hour with a rather well done
Al Jazeera Special Series documentary [0] which does a good job of
peeling away the hype around so-called green energy technologies
and revealing their relocated tailpipes.

The documentary highlights some of direct ecological and human
health impacts of the mining and transport parts of the supply
chain, the finite nature of many critical minerals along with the
nearly complete lack of recycling in place, arguing that the whole
endeavor will most likely lead to a ruined planet.

One thing that was somewhat new to me but not really surprising
was that many of the source countries for rare earth minerals are
no longer content with the chump change derived from exporting raw
materials and are actively moving to leverage their positions via
value addition and/or producing finished products.

The one critique I had was the failure to point out how so much
of this "green revolution" is highly dependent on fossil fuel inputs,
from extraction and transport to manufacturing and maintenance.
Even if hydrogen were substituted for fossil fuels, that hydrogen
would need to be sourced from solar, wind or hydro, which in turn
needs to be supported and maintained via hydrogen..  One has to
wonder if the EROEI of the entire scheme, if calculated, would
even come close to justify the undertaking.

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[0] The Dark Side of Green Energy (run time 0:47:42)
 https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2020/09/dark-side-green-energy-200906101945535.html