Glasgow: The Stampede To Mass Poverty…120 BILLION Tonnes Of Materials For Wind Turbines By 2050?

Commentary by Fred F. Mueller 

[Germany] When looking at the current frenzy around the climate rescue event COP 26 in Glasgow, one can only get scared. Not because of our climate, which doesn’t care about the whole hype, but because of the proposed hysteria-driven radical measures.

Leading to a humanitarian catastrophe

The whole CO2 hypothesis is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about the CO2 cycles of the earth, because the actual changes take place in the oceans and not in the atmosphere. The fear of mankind’s insignificant CO2 emissions, stoked by an incredible propaganda campaign, is now leading us toward a humanitarian catastrophe that will probably cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.

Glasgow is the media highlight of a campaign that has been running for decades to dissuade mankind from using fossil raw materials such as coal, oil and natural gas. In the meantime, the anti-fossil campaign has assumed a breadth and mass that resembles a veritable tsunami in its effect on our society. In the past, it was mainly politicians, the media and “environmental” NGOs that put pressure on industry and banks. Today, Big Industry and Big Money are also aligned and have mutated into driving forces of “de-fossilization”.

The dwindling number of remaining mining and oil production companies are being squeezed in a variety of ways. At the behest of  central banks, they are no longer being granted loans, insurance companies are refusing to cover operational risks, customers must prove they are not buying “CO2-polluted” products, and in addition, associations such as the Carbon Disclosure Project are exerting enormous internal pressure through all possible channels.

The newest forces in this round are legal courts, all the way up to the German Federal Constitutional Court, which for example grant Peruvian farmers or young people from remote bushlands in the middle of nowhere the rights of action against our basic industries. As the icing on the cake, activist investors are now also making their appearance, using comparatively small amounts of capital to break up reluctant corporations and pick the fattest chunks from the leftovers.

Drax power plant no longer burns coal. Now it burns about one local forest a day. (Photo taken by Paul Glazzard, Attribution Share-alike license 2.0  CC BY-SA 2.0)

A round dance of cruelties

In the media frenzy of Glasgow, a veritable stampede is currently developing where everyone is trying to outdo the other with promises of ever tougher anti-CO2 measures. Moreover, there is no coordinated and thus specifically controllable action. Instead, a patchwork of countless actors from politics, associations, activists and the courts are rushing individually in the same direction. Apparently, none of the politicians in Glasgow has the slightest idea what they are doing to themselves and to all of humanity with these promises.

The first effects are already being felt with rapidly rising prices in the energy sector. Few seem to bother about the fact that the extraction of raw materials is an enormously time-consuming and capital-intensive undertaking. Regardless of whether we are talking about fossil raw materials or ores: The development of new deposits often takes more than five years and can quickly swallow up billions. And often enough, they are exhausted after just 10 years or so.

Raw materials supplies will be interrupted 

To ensure that supplies do not come to a standstill, raw material producers must therefore invest continuously in new projects. And it is precisely this continuity that is being shattered by the current campaigns. The consequences will be felt much faster than we can imagine today. What we are now experiencing with coal, oil and gas will spread like wildfire to all raw materials, and once the run on dwindling supplies has begun, there will be a scramble in which second and third world countries will not be able to keep up.

Even Europe will then be pushed aside by the next broad-shouldered “America First” representative. The already rising tide of poverty refugees from Africa, Asia and Latin America will swell to gigantic proportions and put all of Europe in great distress.

Warning signals: magnesium, aluminium and cement

Just a handful of specialists seem to have noticed the significance of the recent magnesium shortage. Since the production of magnesium requires a lot of electricity, western companies got out of this business a long time ago. Many here were even happy to leave these “dirty” activities to China with its abundant and cheap coal-fired power generation. At the same time, one could then lash out at China as “the world’s biggest climate polluter.”

Since then, magnesium production had to be cut back there, not only because of electricity prices, but also because the power plants had exhausted their CO2 quotas, which were fixed by the state. China, too, is now firmly in the grip of CO2 hysteria.

This has triggered a chain reaction that no one seems to have had on the radar. Magnesium is one of the most important alloying elements for high-quality aluminium alloys. The value chain today runs as follows: No CO2 means no magnesium, which means no aluminium. Period.

Similar rationales apply to steel and cement, and in principle to all other metals. How are we supposed to install at least 150,000 wind turbines that will be needed in Germany alone in the future if we are neither able to produce neither steel nor cement for them? Green hydrogen and similar “alternatives” can only be exalted by people who have no idea whatsoever of such mundane terms as energy efficiency or cost-benefit ratio.

There’s no civilisation without electricity

The brutal truth is that the uncoordinated, hysteria-driven global campaign against CO2 is causing us to catastrophically cripple the world’s energy and raw materials supply without really knowing how to generate the missing electricity. Wind and solar are useless for this, but few experts know that. On television, you only ever see certain “experts” who talk the talk of CO2 hysteria and are well paid for it. A prime example is Germany’s Claudia Kemfert, who appears in every available talk show. As an economist, however, she does not know the complexity of the technology for power generation.

How about 50% wind power worldwide?

What would we need for wind power alone for the year 2050, with then 10 billion people worldwide? Based on current energy consumption levels, probably 80,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of wind power alone would be needed annually worldwide by 2050. That is, if we want to end hunger and lift the third world out of poverty. That would be equivalent to some 20 million wind turbines. Each wind turbine requires more than 6,000 tons of material, mainly steel and concrete, aluminium, copper and rare earth metals. That adds up to some 120 billion tons of material. Let’s not even talk about the costs.

At the same time, existing power generation is already being cut away with brute force. But such aspects are not being thought about in Glasgow. There the motto is a Mad Max like Safari, who shoots the most CO2 sinners. And the latest fad is that they want to save the forests. Interesting about face specifically for England, where a large coal-fired power plant has been converted to wood-fired power. Year after year, gigantic quantities of wood are felled in America and shipped from there across the Atlantic and disappear in its fiery gullet. Of course, this project has all necessary eco-labels of being perfectly climate-friendly and CO2-free!




12 responses to “Glasgow: The Stampede To Mass Poverty…120 BILLION Tonnes Of Materials For Wind Turbines By 2050?”

  1. Richard Greene

    Blah Blah Blah

    I propose COP be changed to CLAP
    Climate Liars Annual Party

    A virtue signalling exercise
    for the private jet set.

  2. kpz

    People are mostly misinformed, but it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid –
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/11/03/just-a-quarter-of-swedes-trust-mainstream-media-climate-change-reporting/

  3. drumphish

    20,000,000 turbines times 3,000,000 USD per copy minimum cost, the total will be 60,000,000,000,000 dollars, 60 trillion dollars needed to fund 20 million wind turbines. More crazy than absurd. You’re in la la land.

    Each wind turbine needs 60 gallons of synthetic gear oil for the gearbox. You’ll need 1,200,000,000 gallons of gear oil too. Works out to 28,571,428 barrels of synthetic gear oil that needs to be changed once each year.

    All oils break down, synthetics are specially formulated to last longer.

    You would have to track the amount of time a wind turbine would generate electricity and gauge the time total to work a schedule to change gear oils.

    Maybe you can get two years out of synthetic gear oil.

    You’re going to be busy changing gear oil each year on 20 million wind turbines.

    There is one gallon of gear oil refined from each barrel of oil, so you’ll initially need 1.2 billion barrels of oil to obtain your 28 million barrels of gear oil from the refined crude oil.

    It’ll be recyclable, there will be a need for 75 million barrels of synthetic gear oil, the 28 million in 20 million wind turbines, another 47 million in the recycling chain.

    You’ll need hydrocarbons every inch of the way, vehicles, transporting gear oils hither and yon, offices, employees. Makes little sense, there’ll be a lot of bickering.

    It’ll get tiresome, the maintenance will never stop, the entire system will collapse due to ennui alone.

    A brainless pursuit that will end in disaster. Not to mention machine failure and cost to the environment, birds will stay grounded permanently.

    Best to rethink the endeavor, there is an excuse for ignorance, but not for stupidity.

    There is no rest for the stupid.

    1. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

      And that’s just the turbine!

      If you get bored :-), take a look at how much concrete is required to provide the anchor for one of those monstrosities – and how much raw material it takes to make the cement, etc., for that concrete, and how much CO2 the production of those raw materials (especially the cement) emits.

      And that’s not even getting into the metals for the tower and such.

      None of these religious fanatics have ever done any project management – and it shows in their plans for their moai.

    2. Senex

      The maintenance does stop, though. Maintenance costs increase with years in service, just like automobiles or aircraft. Currently, absent revenue subsidies, annual maintenance costs for commercial wind turbines begin to exceed the revenue from generated electricity after about 15 years, as witnessed by images of parks of idled older wind turbines.

      1. oebele bruinsma

        Very good point.

  4. Gerald the Mole

    Our best hope is for some not too extreme level of energy shortage to hit a major European country. Enough to bring pain the the poor inhabitants so that they are really motivated to rise against their ruling class. Hopefully other countries will notice and, for a change, act sensibly.

  5. Gus

    Coal, oil, and gas are essential for production of countless materials, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. What are you going to wrap meat in at the supermarkets if you don’t have polyethylene? What are you going to make disposable syringes of? Look at your car, EV or otherwise. Everything inside is made of plastics, which are derived, one way or another, from coal, oil, and gas. How are you going to make laundry detergents and fabric softener? How are you going to make steel without coal?

    What we’re witnessing today is a massive enviro-fascist attack on the whole civilization. But even if they and their lackeys in the media, administration, and politics manage to destroy EU and the US, they’ll be powerless against Russia, China, India and Brazil–BRICs. And that’s where you’ll find a glimmer of hope.

  6. Glasgow: The Stampede To Mass Poverty…120 BILLION Tonnes Of Materials For Wind Turbines By 2050? – Climate- Science.press

    […] Reposted from the NoTricksZone […]

  7. Nick Schroeder

    By reflecting away 30% of the incoming solar radiation the albedo, which could not exist w/o the atmosphere or GreenHouse Gases, renders the Earth cooler than it would be without that atmosphere much like that reflective panel propped up on the dash cools the car. Remove the atmosphere or GHGs and there would be no more water vapor or clouds, no ice and snow, no vegetation, no oceans and no more 30% albedo. The Earth would become much like the Moon, a barren rock orb with a 10% albedo receiving 20% more kJ/h, hot^3 400 K on the lit side, cold^3 100 K on the dark. Nikolov, Kramm (U of AK) and UCLA Diviner mission all tacitly agree.

    For the GHGs to warm per the Radiative GreenHouse Effect theory requires “extra” energy upwelling from the surface radiating long wave infrared energy as an ideal black body. Refer to annotated Figure 1 of (TFK_bams09.pdf (ucar.edu)) attached.

    This theoretical scenario is impossible because of the non-radiative, i.e. kinetic, heat transfer processes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules and as demonstrated by experiment, the gold standard of classical science. The experiment can be accessed at this link:
    https://principia-scientific.org/debunking-the-greenhouse-gas-theory-with-a-boiling-water-pot/

    The RGHE theory is as erroneous as caloric, phlogiston and luminiferous ether.

    Mankind’s GHGs are not responsible for the alleged global mean surface temperature anomaly increase of 1.2 C over 140 years. (See attached graphic) This barely detectable change is noise in the data, instrumentation drift, urban heat island effect, natural variation, i.e. insignificant let alone some kind of dangerous trend.

  8. Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #478 – Watts Up With That?

    […] Glasgow: The Stampede To Mass Poverty…120 BILLION Tonnes Of Materials For Wind Turbines By 205… […]

  9. Stephen Bowers

    I work in the chemical industry (43 years) and no chemical industry means there will be none of the turbines or anything else. Shell recently announced an electrolysis unit to produce hydrogen. 100 MW produces about 13kta of hydrogen which is enough to hydrogenate about 400 kta of vegetable oils ( Global oil demand 4 billion tonnes). The same plant will need about 50 x 5MW wind turbines (40% capacity efficiency and no back up). A world scale steam cracker to produce ethylene will consume 1GW power for the furnace operations, so by extrapolation would need about 500 wind turbines.

    Likewise all the BS written about biofuels has come to nothing. EROI always wins in the end and wind turbine will fail because the EROI will simply make wind, solar, bio options simply unworkable.

    In 1970 a book called the Limits to Growth was written. A thirty year update was published 20 years ago. Much of the predictions are coming to be. The idiots at COP refuse to acknowledge the obvious. We cannot support a population of 7.5 billion for much longer let alone 10 billion which will happen well before 2050 at current trajectories. Global anarchy looms because weak politicians cannot see past the end of their noses, aided by those who believe in some arcane super being coming to the rescue of mankind. In fact the anarchy has already started because mass migration is only gaining traction.

    Meawhile the groping senile incontinet Joe seems to care only about international pro-nouns day and the first US trangender 4 star general.

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