Mercury wrote: ↑October 29th, 2022, 5:27 pm
Mercury wrote: ↑October 29th, 2022, 6:18 am
Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 29th, 2022, 1:04 am
The rate of population increase is slowing but, because a rate is a percentage of whole - and the whole is growing - the actual number of people is increasing every year, despite being a reduced proportion of a growing whole.
Belindi wrote: ↑October 29th, 2022, 4:50 am Hence we will see a rise in right wing regimes. The very rich will rule from their luxury bunkers. Civilisation decreases in the fight for survival amid decreasing natural resources.
The idea that the rich can remain rich without any basis in the real economy is a fallacy. It cannot work because the value of money is relative. What is a gold bar worth to a man in the desert dying of thirst? A glass of water! Money does not have inherent value. It is a token of the value of the things that can be purchased with it.
If the rich neglect society such they need to retreat to bunkers they won't be rich anymore. Their money will be worthless because it cannot buy anything of value. Hence, the rich cannot afford for society to fail - and that so, faced with climate change, must apply magma energy technology. Supplying limitless clean energy is the only way to maintain the living standards of the general population, and so maintain the value of money.
Any shift toward left wing or right wing autocracy that regards the people as the enemy is doomed to failure; a spiral of entropic decline with less energy, at greater cost, in face of increasing challenges. The only conceivable path to a long term future is to maintain and extend capitalist democratic freedom and prosperity powered by limitless clean energy from magma.
Belindi wrote: ↑October 29th, 2022, 3:02 pm That is all true. However in "luxury bunkers" I include a subordinate class of men who serve the rich overlords.
It's difficult to appreciate how having limitless clean energy to spend would change the equation; it would be a new phase in human existence - as different as the industrial age was from every preceding era. We'd have a future to grow into; not a cul-de-sac, but an open road ahead - a vast landscape of previously un-imagined opportunity would be opened to us.
It's universally assumed that resources are a fixed quantity; but that's incorrect. Resources are a function of the energy available to create them - and the energy available from magma is monolithic; up to 10,000 times current global energy demand just from the US alone. Worldwide, the energy available is effectively limitless. And we can get there from here without turning the world upside down.
We could not only meet - but exceed current global energy demand, plus have power to desalinate sea water to irrigate land for agriculture and new urban landscapes. We'd have the power available to recycle all waste, and extract carbon from the atmosphere. We could internalise the externalities of capitalism with limitless clean energy - and so continue to grow economically without destroying the world. The energy is there; the technology to harness it is proven. A prosperous sustainable future is technologically possible; but neither the billionaire class nor anti-capitalist climate change protesters believe that! Both would rather write us off; I'm officially offended!
Belindi wrote: ↑October 30th, 2022, 5:57 am
Is there a political reason or a geological reason magma energy remains untapped?
Is magma energy got from burning something like oil or coal, resulting in environmental pollution as do fossil fuels?
Edited:
https://education.nationalgeographic.or ... mal-energy
The main problems seem to be the initial cost of tapping the energy, destabilising surface areas and earthquakes, and sealing in harmful substances to protect clean water sources.
Magma is the heat energy of the earth itself, the molten rock beneath our feet. Around 50% of that heat is primordial - meaning leftover from the formation of the earth. The other 50% is radiogenic - meaning the result of the decay of radioactive elements.
Magma does contain dissolved carbon dioxide and other gasses - under pressure, that under certain conditions can be released - explosively. However, tapping a magma energy would not create the conditions for the explosive release of magma, because - it's been shown that a narrow borehole drilled directly into a magma chamber, magma solidifies after a few meters. However, it's not necessary to drill directly into a magma chamber to harness magma energy. The target would be the red hot rock surrounding a magma chamber.
All of the problems you list there are not associated with magma-geothermal energy - but with hydro-geothermal energy. The former taps directly into the energy of hot rock. The latter taps into underground bodies of hot water. Underground bodies of water expand when heated, and contract when cooled by the extraction of energy. This causes earthquakes. That water can become polluted, rise up the pipe and leak into groundwater. There's also the 'replacement rate' problem with hydro-geothermal; in that an underground body of hot water once cooled by energy extraction takes time to heat up again, and this can be difficult to predict making the investment risky. A hydro-geothermal well can 'run dry'!
Magma energy has none of these problems, because the heat transfer liquid is contained in a closed loop system of pipes; with a heat exchanger at the bottom of the borehole. Hot liquid rises, cold water is drawn down to be heated, and the thing runs forever, carbon free, pollution free, no earthquakes, no volcanoes - just heavy duty base load clean energy.
There's a lot of confusion around different forms of geothermal; at least some of which I suspect is deliberate. It's telling that this technology has gone ignored for 40 years; after being proven viable by NASA/Sandia Labs from 1975-1982. It's disappointing that environmentalists have not demanded this technology be applied; but instead pushed the 'Limits to Growth' narrative as an anti-capitalist agenda - they have put ahead of a practical and promising means of reconciling human and environmental welfare.