Geologists doubt Earth has the amount of copper needed to develop the entire world
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Yeah, just a little pollution is okay as long as you don't misuse it.
There are a staggering number of varieties of plastics, and an insane number of uses for them that aren’t easily replicated with other known materials. Some of those plastics are much worse than others.
Plastic is not inherently “pollution.” That’s not to say that plastics don’t make up a significant amount of the world’s pollution, but like literally everything in life, it’s not as simple as a black-and-white.
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This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we're not running out of raw materials; we're thinking about the problem wrong:
Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.
This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.
That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
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What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:
Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.
Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.
“First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”
Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be ... just in renewable power plants?
This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.
Most electrical transmission lines are aluminum because it's cheaper and lighter
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Well the earth is already developed enough so i guess the copper was enough???
Catch me in Uganda
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Yeah, that ain't happening for the next 50 years. The amount of logistics and technology required for that is beyond immense, never mind risks
Well, I suspect we've got enough copper for the next 50 years, so... good timing.
And, you don't start with a Manhattan sized rock, you practice with little ones just big enough to survive re-entry and work your way up. The key is learning to operate long term with "rock moving tech" in solar orbit. We're not there, which is why we should have started 50 years ago...
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Yeah, that ain't happening for the next 50 years. The amount of logistics and technology required for that is beyond immense, never mind risks
Oh, and you say risks, I say: military application potential.
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Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
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What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:
Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.
Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.
“First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”
Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be ... just in renewable power plants?
This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.
Do they think the copper is consumed? Like, renewable resources burn copper?!
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Plastics aren’t inherently bad. Just like anything else, it’s the misuse that makes them bad.
It confuses me when someone thinks plastics are "bad". It's such a privileged, narrow viewpoint that ignores so many of the problems that humanity has needed to solve.
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How much old copper piping is still out there that could be replaced by other materials to recover the copper? I'm sure there are other common obsolete applications. The nice thing about metals is that we already have a pretty robust recycling chain in place for them. That plus the remaining supply plus aluminium plus other replacements plus careful design to minimize the use of copper where it's absolutely necessary might be enough to carry us through.
Aluminum is a substitute for copper in any straight wiring application. PEX for domestic piping.
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That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism's need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered "demand creation" (through advertising) and now even "growth hacking" to supercharge this process.
It has made us more wasteful than ever.
We are headed into a wall. -
Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
Ea-Nasir treats his customers and the world with contempt.
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Also capitalism's need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered "demand creation" (through advertising) and now even "growth hacking" to supercharge this process.
It has made us more wasteful than ever.
We are headed into a wall.This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.
Artificial demand creation isn't necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.
And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that's a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
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We do have enough copper
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Copper can be replaced with other materials in many applications
While we should always be careful about how we expend natural resources, we should not fall into sensationalism.
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Catch me in Uganda
Yeah but maybe instead of wasting all pur fucking resources on phones which we buy every year we could pour some of that into developing critical infrastructure in places that need it. Also aluminium, if youre desperate, is a pretty good replacement for copper. I have a really hard time believing copper would be an actual bottleneck in this.
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There's also the idea of crashing a metallic asteroid somewhere convenient, like the Outback.
If you have the tech to do that, just capture the asteroid in orbit and mine it in space.
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This is an article about scarcity, insufficient supply to meet demand.
Artificial demand creation isn't necessary, or even productive, when the existing demand already outstrips supply.
And if it is the case that demand is much higher than supply, that's a baked in financial incentive that rewards people for efficient recycling.
Capitalism is bad at pricing in externalities. It's pretty good at using price signals to allocate finite resources to more productive uses.
Ever since the crisis of over production, MAJOR, unceasing psycho-social campaign have been continuously been running not just to foster demand but to ensure it exceeds the planned supply and ensure the price margin always remains on the right side of the curve.
This is the central reason why nearly everyone works ceaselessly to buy things they don't need and dont have the time nor energy to use.
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Ea-Nasir, you sold me an insufficient earth!!!
In our modern times, Ea-Nasir still has some bars of aluminum to sell you. Quite several, in fact.
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In a lot of cases you can also use Aluminum instead of copper. You need thicker wires and it's less flexible, but it's doable and cheaper. Some old electric motors from the eastern block used aluminium coils for that matter, because copper was much more expensive there.
Aluminium is actually a better conductor than copper when you judge it by mass, not volume. I think also by tensile strength.
In any case there's a reason that large overland wires aren't copper, but steel-cladded aluminium. Copper will always have its applications but so does gold and yet we're not running out of gold to plate connections with.
In cases like windings requiring more volume is actually an issue, in the case of PCBs... no, despite Apple's insistence, it's actually fine to have a phone that's 0.2mm thicker.
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Now, one place it’s more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.
Is it? As far as I know you can use a larger diameter wire to get the same resistance as copper, if your device has enough space for bigger coils.
You're trying to transmit power via magnetism so distance is an issue.
