Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource that will become increasingly difficult and expensive to find, extract, and process. There is a tipping point where the cost will equal (then exceed) the energy value of the petroleum itself.
Solar panels and wind turbines can be recycled, with the rare metals separated and reused. It’s not like we are sending them to giant landfills and mining new metals to make the replacements. And the sun and wind will be around to use after the fossil fuels are gone.
@rockblossom@rtjhnstn Wind turbines are partially recylable. They are also partially dependent upon petroleum for production of critical components, for now. For example, preserving a viable reserve of petroleum to provide the feed stock to economically manufacture the resins used in building the wind turbine blades is necessary to keep that not-presently-renewable component available. We will probably find a viable way to replace the resins with something non-petro-derived, but for the moment, they are not practical to make without that material. Interconnections like that exist across many technologies; it’s another of the multitude of places where you can’t change just one thing; it almost always causes a cascade. Anticipating the results of change is an inexact process in the best of circumstances; there are so many uninformed opinions driving change for what appears to be good reasons - and others opposing it for what is obvious are bad reasons, that the course of probable change is too indeterminate to make good guesses about the follow-on effects. And there are a hell of a lot of people who either have what they consider a vested interest in just opposing change altogether, or in concealing what they have good reason to know will happen as a result of either change they instigate or change they oppose.
Humankind has not been doing a terribly good job of long-term planning.
And worthwhile IRKs seem to be fabricated from Unobtanium.
@phendrick And that stuff is pretty much always on backorder.
@phendrick I dont know, Ive had pretty good luck
@tinamarie1974 That’s because they want to stay on Charlie’s good side.
@phendrick nah, if that was the case they would just need to slip some PB treats in the box. He is easy!!!
@phendrick
@rtjhnstn Sigh. Facts are important.
@rockblossom If PropagandaU…errrr…I mean PragerU was concerned about facts they wouldn’t be in business.
@rockblossom @rtjhnstn Wind turbines are partially recylable. They are also partially dependent upon petroleum for production of critical components, for now. For example, preserving a viable reserve of petroleum to provide the feed stock to economically manufacture the resins used in building the wind turbine blades is necessary to keep that not-presently-renewable component available. We will probably find a viable way to replace the resins with something non-petro-derived, but for the moment, they are not practical to make without that material. Interconnections like that exist across many technologies; it’s another of the multitude of places where you can’t change just one thing; it almost always causes a cascade. Anticipating the results of change is an inexact process in the best of circumstances; there are so many uninformed opinions driving change for what appears to be good reasons - and others opposing it for what is obvious are bad reasons, that the course of probable change is too indeterminate to make good guesses about the follow-on effects. And there are a hell of a lot of people who either have what they consider a vested interest in just opposing change altogether, or in concealing what they have good reason to know will happen as a result of either change they instigate or change they oppose.
Humankind has not been doing a terribly good job of long-term planning.
How many of these to make a MacGuffin?
@pakopako Wouldn’t that be a MehGuffin…?
It’s only marginally relevant, but I like this joke.
