The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Not Very Green
Unless most of us are turned into Soylent Green
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Great Reset, for all the talk of Building Back Better in a Sustainable Way (Net Zero Carbon) with an Internet of Bodies and Things surveilling and tracking everything and everyone and logging it all onto Block Chain has One Big Problem.
The problem is its not very Green and not Very Sustainable, and their may not be enough on planet resources, especially for a planet with 8 billion people.
As presented, the coming Green Digital Economy will be the greatest Environmental and Human Disaster ever. It is as Corey Morningstar says, “The Wrong Kind of Green”
“Natural capital” valuation is expected to replace GDP (Gross Domestic Product) with nature to be bought, sold and traded on Wall Street. 130 trillion dollars from the Developed Nations of the West is to be funneled to the Global South to capture and develop Natural Assets
This, will be coupled with “protected areas” that would further displace Indigenous peoples. In addition to data as the new oil, classifying nature as an asset class represents a global corporate coup of the commons.
GFANZ at COP26 announced plan to lock up natural assets in the Global South by transferring 130 Trillion dollars from the developed countries.
Natural Asset Corporations set up by the Intrinsic Exchange Group will trade on the NYSE to raise the capital to acquire and develop natural resources to build the Digital Gulag Infrastructure envisioned by by the WEF and Klaus Schwabs Great Reset
Physical labour is now disposable, to be replaced by automation/robotics. Data and nature represent new and untapped emerging markets. What do you think they will do to the Useless Class given the Material Resources to Build Back Better are limited
For example, Anders Andrae, senior researcher at Huawei in Sweden ( 2017 Digital Business Summit) forecast that communications technology may account for more than 20 percent of global energy consumption by 2025, accounting for 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320225452_Total_Consumer_Power_Consumption_Forecast
Andrae cautions that data center energy consumption could increase 15-fold by 2030, amounting to 11% of the global demand.
In a worst-case scenario, it is suggested that communication technologies could use as much as 51% of global electricity by 2030. In this scenario, "CT electricity usage could contribute up to 23% of the globally released GHG emissions in 2030".
In 2019, coal was the world’s largest source of electricity, representing 35.18% of the total (despite a 3% year-on-year fall), followed by natural gas (23.52%), hydro (16.54%), nuclear (10.52%), wind (5.44%), other fossil fuels (3.47%).
Solar accounted for 2.71%, biomass and waste accounted for 2.24%, with “other renewable” coming in at 0.4%
2019-September 18 Fortune reported “only 12 percent of Amazon’s Loudoun County data centers and 4.0 percent of Google’s are powered by renewable energy, despite their promise to shift to 100 percent renewable energy”.
2020-September 14, Google released its most asinine statement to date: “As of today, we have eliminated Google’s entire carbon legacy (covering all our operational emissions before we became carbon neutral in 2007) through the purchase of high-quality carbon offsets.
“Net zero” has nothing to do with zero emissions, that carbon offsets, an instrument of imperialism and colonialism, do nothing to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions .
Data centers are the heat engines of the internet. Eight million running 24/7 in order to meet the global demand. A demand now set to expand exponentionally
Data centers are proliferating, while approximately 1 billion people, after 270 years of industrial revolutions, still have no access to electricity.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution architecture, built upon, dependent upon, 5G and 6G communication internet technologies, may very well require more metals than the Earth can provide.
As a result, industry has already begun its pursuit of yet another emerging market – seabed mining, at scale.
2020 September 14, Microsoft announced “underwater data centers are a go” after its researchers retrieved the prototype sealed capsule of a data center, off the shores of Orkney Islands, Scotland, where it had been submerged in the spring of 2018.
The experiment, Project Natick was the second carried out by Microsoft. The first capsule was submerged off the California coast in 2014.
Coolants for data centers require toxic/hazardous chemicals, while large diesel generators are required for power shortages and outages.
Consider that the Apple data center which was planned for Athenry, Co. Galway, Ireland, but scrapped in 2018 would have required 144 large diesel generators as back-up for when there was no wind, or insufficient renewable energy production, to support the power demands.
In addition to diesel generators, battery (back-ups are required for power shortages. This leads to another nightmare, now unfolding.
A 2018 Bloomberg New Energy Finance reportforecasted that Li-ion technology will comprise 40 percent of all data centre backup batteries by 2025, and that in the hyperscale sector, Li-ion will become the predominant battery technology, accounting for 55 percent of UPS
January 11. 2020: “The uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is the cornerstone of the modern data centre, and is one of the primary culprits of inefficient usage of hardware. Traditional lead-based batteries are becoming increasingly redundant…
Huawei’s SmartLi UPS solution answers the call by leveraging the company’s cutting-edge Li-ion battery technology and delivering a ‘reinvention’ of the power supply system for the next generation of data centres…
No further do we need to look, to see the “green energy transition”, as imperialism, quantified, than the November 11, 2019 coup in Bolivia, a country holding vast reserves of Earth’s lithium. The single largest lithium deposit in the Salar de Uyuni, a salt pan, is so massive, it can be seen from space.
On July, 25, 2020, billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk responded to a comment directed toward him on Twitter. The comment read: “The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Moralesin Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk responded with “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president of Bolivia, overthrown in a coup, responded to Musk, drawing attention to the massacres that resulted from the coup, with a reminder of the Bolivian peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination: “We will always defend our resources!”
Consider Green Energy. A two-megawatt windmill is made up of 260 tons of steel that required 300 tons or iron ore and 170 tons of coking coal, all mined, transported and produced by hydrocarbons
A windmill could spin until it falls apart and never generate as much energy as was invested in building it
Around 67 tons of copper is in a medium-sized offshore turbine. To extract this copper, miners move almost 50,000 tons of earth and rock.. The ore is shredded, ground, watered and leached... a lot of nature destroyed for a little bit of green power.
77 tons of carbon dioxide are emitted during the manufacture of one ton of neodymium, a rare earth metal that is used in wind turbines. By comparison: Even the production of a ton of steel only emits around 1.9 tons of CO2.
In a solar park measuring 1,000 by 1,000 meters, there are fully 11 tons of silver.
A single Tesla Model S contains as much lithium as around 10,000 mobile phones. An electric car requires six times as many critical raw materials as a combustion engine – mainly copper, graphite, cobalt and nickel for the battery system.
An onshore wind turbine contains around nine times as many of these substances as a gas-fired power plant of comparable capacity
According to calculations by the International Energy Agency (IEA), global demand for critical raw materials will quadruple by 2040 – in the case of lithium, demand is expected to be as high as 42 times greater.
According to IEA head Fatih Birol, these materials are becoming "essential components of a future clean global energy system.”
Indonesia and the Philippines command around 45 percent of the global nickel supply. China supplies 60 percent of rare earth metals. The Congo is responsible for about two-thirds of cobalt production. South Africa dominates around 70 percent of the platinum market.
According to the IEA, an internal combustion vehicle emits 40 tons of greenhouse gases over a life cycle of 200,000 kilometers, more than twice as much as an electric car, despite the CO2-intensive production of the battery.
The weakness of the e-car is that it requires so many more mineral raw materials than internal combustion vehicles, including quite a few critical materials that are often mined under dubious conditions.
The battery in the iX electric SUV recently unveiled by BMW contains about 6 kilograms of cobalt, 10 kilograms of lithium and 60 kilos of copper. These are all raw materials that are seldom or almost never found in a gas or diesel engine.
The energy intensive 5G cellular networks serve as the very foundation of the new global architecture, as designed and sought by the ruling class.
ICT experts suggest that “thanks to a combination of massive MIMO antennas, legacy networks in multiple bands and the massive proliferation of small cells”, 5G networks will consume three and half times more electricity as present 4G networks.
5G broadband is the instrumental network that transports the data – with data centers as the heat engines. Together, they create a digital technosphere.... All under the guise of climate mitigation and the protection of biodiversity.
satellites are already being launched into space that will support the 5G and 6G networks, connecting trillions of devices. On November 11, 2019 SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, owned by Elon Musk, rocketed 60 satellites into orbit.
This followed a launch of 60 SpaceX satellites launched in May 2019. By February 2020, SpaceX had launched five batches of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit – with a long-term goal of 30,000.
But Musk is far from alone in his quest to dominate the sky. There are 57,000 satellites planned through 2029. “When there are 50,000 satellites in the sky, ‘you’ll see the sky crawling,’ says Tony Tyson, a University of California Davis astronomer and physicist. ‘Every square degree will have something crawling in it.'
“In addition, unregulated rocket launch emissions will further impact the global atmosphere while adding enormous quantities of space debris.
On April 25, 2020, China launched the world’s largest Blockchain network (BSN) as the country rapidly transitions to digital central bank currency, digital wallets, digital identifications, automation, IoT, AI and biometrics at scale.
On August 10, 2020, China rolled out its international websitewith Google and Amazon Web Services listed as cloud service providers.
With a share of around 50 percent of global demand for raw materials, China now occupies a position of supremacy that was reserved for the United States in the middle of the 20th century...That’s not going to change anytime soon.
China is the largest supplier of numerous metals. At the same time, Beijing has built up a network of partner countries – and it has made them dependent. It pumps capital into countries like Chile, Bolivia and Congo, buying mining rights and access to scarce resources.
China’s dominance in processing is even more pronounced. The country is the leading producer of 23 out of 26 refined products, and its share of rare earths is around 90 percent.
Beijing aims to cover all stages of the value chain, from ore to e-car batteries. China controls about 75 percent of all lithium-ion battery production capacity worldwide.
From Ian Davis article (a must read)
https://in-this-together.com/global-commons-part-2/
Cobalt
SDG’s led to net zero policies and they stipulate, among a swath of enforced changes, the end of petrol and diesel transport. We are all under orders to switch to electric vehicles (EVs) which the vast majority won’t be able to afford.
In turn, this means a massive increase in demand for lithium-ion batteries. Manufacturing these will require a lot more cobalt which is widely considered to be the most critical supply chain risk for producing EVs.
The World Bank estimates that the growth in demand for cobalt between 2018 and 2050 will be somewhere in the region of 450%. To say this is a “market opportunity” is a massive understatement.
BHP Group Ltd., the world's largest miner by market value, has formed an exploration alliance with KoBold Metals, a Silicon Valley startup backed by Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the companies said on Wednesday.
KoBold, which is focused on using artificial intelligence to find new sources of electric-vehicle and renewable-energy metals, will initially partner with BHP to search for commodities such as nickel and copper in Western Australia before expanding to other places, the companies said. BHP and KoBold will jointly operate and fund exploration programs.
OCEAN
The ISA (International Seabed Association) has granted 5 cobalt exploration contracts to JOGMEC (Japan), COMRA (China), Russia, the Republic of Korea and CPRM (Brazil). When located deposits become commercially viable, as they undoubtedly will, the corporate feeding frenzy can begin.
Corporations, such as the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, with its wholly owned subsidiary UK Seabed Resources (UKSR), are also among the many ISA stakeholders.
UKSR received their exploration license for the South Pacific in 2013. As an ISA exploration contractor, UKSR stakeholders are free to submit their recommendations for amendments to the ISA regulations governing their own mining operations.
For example, the ISA stated that mining corporations should provide a financial guarantee that would cover “unexpected costs, expenses and liabilities.” Lockheed Martin didn’t like this at all and so suggested a slight change. They recommended the addition of the following:
“The Guarantee is not to cover costs, expenses and liabilities incurred as a result of tortious liability for environmental damage.”
This was presumably because, in their pursuit of SDG “protection” of the planet, Lockheed Martin doesn’t wish to be liable for the environmental damage they will inflict upon it in the process. This risk of this is high because the proposed method for “scraping the seabed” will almost certainly destroy it.
Fortunately for UKSR and other stakeholders like COMRA, the ISA is committed to regulations which promote sound commercial principles and safeguard their commercial interests.
Destroying the seabed is a risk worth taking but not if you have to pay for it.
When it comes to fighting climate change, human life is even cheaper. Nearly all cobalt is currently mined from Africa’s copper belt and more than 60% of the world supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is clawed from the Earth by tens of thousands of child slaves.
This poisonous torture dramatically shortens the abject misery of their suffering on this Earth. However, it does mean other young people like Greta Thunberg can inspire more fortunate children to mobilise on social media, using their fully charged devices, to save the planet.
Only the commercial viability of deep-sea reserves seems capable of saving the cobalt mine slaves.
Alas, it is difficult to envisage how ocean alternatives will become viable until the land-based reserves near exhaustion.
This openly condoned child abuse has been ongoing for years. A fact which the world’s media admits but never mentions when it eulogises about the green revolution
The estimated 94,000 tonnes of cobalt in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Eastern Pacific alone represents 6 times the known land-based reserves. With total deep-sea reserves estimated to be worth between $8 – $16 trillion, as we progress towards a carbon-neutral economy, deep-sea mining is an inevitability. Regardless of the environmental cost.
Conclusion-As you can see, building and maintaining a Green Digital Economy may not be possible without devastating the environment, assuming they can get the metals and energy they need on Earth, at least not for a population of 8 billion people
Since mining Asteroids is probably far off in the future, and assuming they are in a rush to build what looks more like a Digital Gulag, then what can they do?
For one thing they might want to scale down. Lets say just build it for 1 billion people.
You may say “But that leaves 7 billion of us running free. Doesn’t it? “
Don’t worry about it. Isn’t it about time for your tenth booster? Trust me, they have a plan to prevent that from happening. I wonder what it could be?