Beware — the death of fossil fuels will kill everything

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Forging the base ring for a giant wind turbine in a Spanish foundry. That’s a giant ingot of tool steel. Memo to Greens: The manufacturing required to produce your wind turbines cannot be done with wind turbines. It needs mining, drilling, smelting and milling, all of which depend on coal, oil and gas, but if we stop looking for that stuff it will run out.

Dr John Constable, Energy Editor of the Global Warming Policy Forum, took part in a debate at the Financial Times Energy Transitions Summit, opposing the motion that “Fossil Fuels are Doomed”. He did not succeed, but nevertheless gave an extraordinary new view of the symbiotic relationship between the fossil fuels our society now depends on and the renewable fuels we aspire to. He urges caution in mandating a too-rapid renunciation of fossil fuels, going as far as to argue that they actually create the renewable forms of energy — and proves it. Here’s his full speech, from the GWPF. – RT

Energy transitions are intrinsically slow and the incoming energy system is necessarily and unavoidably created by the previous one.

Think of the history. The transition from the organically fuelled economy of the late Medieval period to the mineral based economy of the twentieth century took something like five hundred years in Europe and North America, and even today has not yet reached the whole world. Continue Reading →

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