The conventional wisdom is that the most common metal on this planet is a huge molten nickel-iron globe occupying roughly its innermost quarter. So - we’re never going to run out of nickel, are we? Er - if we can get at it, that is.
Same applies to a whole lot of this ‘abundant’ fossil hydrocarbons that Fletcher describes. Accessibility, and cost - particularly Energy Return On Energy Invested - are the limiting factors. There’s lots of metal ores in the Asteroid Belt, too. Good luck with mining that, and getting it back to Earth under full control the whole way down.
Abstruse estimates by academics of ‘how much’ of something might be theoretically present close by doesn’t pencil out, unfortunately, to all of those resources ever becoming available to us; not practically speaking. Oil and natgas have been on the Peak plateau for some time. The only way now - sooner or later - is down. And that seems to be true whether the oil is biotic or abiotic. Even if it really is abiotic, it isn’t noticeably refilling the recently drained pools; so really what does it matter how it was first created?
At present about 75% (that’s a rough guess) of all energy resources on Earth are used to produce utter crap that no one really needs (and that includes war). It’s called capitalism, or whatever other label you want to give it.
All this utter crap, that people are persuaded to buy, ends-up, in short order, in rubbish dumps. IE, it completely pollutes the environment.
Ok, Scotty…
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Well that’s ‘conventional wisdom’ for you…it’s based on…well, what, exactly
Accordingly, Earth has a crust of a thickness between 5 - 70 km; a mantle of a some 2,900 km; an outer core of 2,200 km, and an inner core between 1,230 - 1,530 km…
…yet the deepest ever excavation on Earth was the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia - that achieved just a tad beyond 7 miles in depth! They tried to go deeper but the technology wasn’t available…apparently it still isn’t.
So which scientific findings can possibly bring us to that ‘conventional wisdom’ of a bubbling molten core in the Earth’s heart?
Er - the liquid magma sluicing out of active volcanoes? And they’re only reaching a few miles down. Clearly there’s some hot molten stuff down there somewhere…
Yes, RG - but magma is molten rock…not liquid metal ; )
Look, I’m not saying there isn’t a bubbling cauldron tucked in there somewhere - I just don’t see how it could possibly be known…just like the supposed planet-sized diamond at Jupiter’s core…there’s no way of knowing!
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That’s exactly right, Si. And it’s at the heart of an ongoing apostasy which has come over me lately - directly triggered, I surmise, by the covid scam; in particular by all the evidence which has trickled out over these past nearly three years - just as I expected at the outset. It was clear then that we didn’t really know what was happening, but it was pretty clear - already - that it wasn’t the narrative we were being fed.
The sheer scale of the criminal scam that was worked on the world by the covid swindle has shocked me - and millions of others who’ve seen the reality, I think - into questioning literally everything.
It’s become clear to me that many things that I’ve ‘known’ for decades - such as the molten nickel-iron core of the Earth for just one instance of a multitude of never-previously-questioned beliefs - are simply ideas which I was fed during youth; and which I had never questioned sufficiently before!
As a result of this jolting experience, I’m now engaged, involuntarily, on an overall house-cleaning of my baggage of unexamined assumptions, taken on trust.
I don’t really know what’s at the Earth’s centre; I don’t really know how sequestered hydrocarbons came to be where they are, and how they came to be. And so on, really extensively!
Matter of fact, outside my sphere of direct, long-continued personal hands-on, actually eye-balled experience, I can’t be too sure of just about anything that I thought I knew.
I bet that the conspirators behind the covid scam didn’t foresee that unexpected consequence of their swindle, kicked up as it has been in many minds worldwide, I suspect.
But I’d still give you good odds that we are indeed on an ebb-tide of many commodities which are irreplaceably essential to modern hitech industrial society. The Limits To Growth, at least, still stand up as clearly real. And energy availability, especially in dense liquid form, remains a key item in that quandary.
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Hallelujah, RG!
And thank you X
Interesting BTL comment:
ricter29
23 years I drilled for oil all over and not once did any geologist ever call it a fossil fuel. It’s a mineral and there is so much of it. We did core samples in southern Saskatchewan in Canada and had tens of meters of oil soaked cores. I’m talking sweet light crude. Think of that to drill 4000 meters straight down and for 100’s of meters it’s nothing but oil. That’s a lot. But nothing was said they boxed it up and we cemented the well moved the rig off they cut the casing and buried it. Makes you wonder why…cause there is more oil than you can possibly imagine under our feet.
This is a growing idea, floating around various apparently savvy commentators. It will be interesting to see whether it turns out to be true, as current shortages bite. One of those wait and see things…