@Discovereads God you are outdated.
Mechanisation isn’t bad 🫤. It’s good and all that farm equipment comes in electric options. There are also plenty of fossil fuel free fertilisers and pesticides. Not to mention that sustainable farming practices include crop rotation where fields are grazed on as part of said rotation and the cow/sheep poo adds the nitrogen back in without recourse to nitrogen fertiliser made from natural gas.
The electric options don’t work. You cannot have battery operated combines or large tractors, they’re too heavy and the infrastructure to power them isn’t remotely there (farms have a tendency of not being anywhere near major urban areas).
The latest John Deere prototypes are tiny for the BEVs, with the ones that could do what actual tractors do requiring power cables to be suspended and towed along with the unit. Also, they costs far more than diesel or even the diesel-electric hybrid systems.
The current industrialised agricultural system relies on fossil inputs. There’s no way around that. Want to see a country that went full organic? It’s been in the news lately. They lost 50% of yield as soon as the mandate to go green came into being in 2021. Their president fled the nation this week.
Hydrogen & oxygen come from our atmosphere and we are not going to run out of it for hundreds of millions of years- far longer than any species has ever survived so don’t think we need to worry about that.
There is NO free hydrogen in the atmosphere. Jesus. This is secondary school knowledge.
Do you even know where we get hydrogen from currently? It's natural gas. The cylinders I order for my lab are, along with helium, rocketing in price because we got a huge amount from Russian natural gas.
On desal, I don’t need to ask anyone. I’ve installed desal on remote islands very cheaply with RO plants powered by wind turbines supporting populations in thousands. It’s easy to scale up or down and very fast to build and cheap to maintain.
I actually doubt that, given the typical per litre/kWh rate for desal plants, they are not economically viable in the least and have a host of other problems such as the salt production and dead zones in littoral waters.
I’m not worried about nuclear plants. We will decommission and demolish them as we move away from rising sea levels. We have enough other green energy coming on line to adjust.
You should be, since it takes a LOT of energy and resources to decommission a nuclear plant, not to mention years. And that’s assuming they don’t run into any Chernobyl, Windscale, or Fukushima related issues.
Modular small nuclear reactors get around this somewhat, but we have no chance to scale these up in anything like the time we have, and they rely on uranium which is, again, finite.
Yes we are running out of some metals like cobalt for example, but so what? We can always reengineer things if we have to. We’ve done so before for different reasons. And I completely disagree with you on energy resources…we have tons of energy. The sun is a vast barely tapped resource.
Checked the ore quality of copper and rare earths lately? How about the price of lithium? Declining ore qualities means more dirt has to be dug to find the same amount of what we normally could get from surface seams a century ago. This is illustrated by just how massive open pit mining has become and how amazingly bad for the environment it all is. The boom in EVs has produced some crazy price increases too, to the point that they are raising prices to offset the losses in lithium costs and neodymium and cobalt, or even just copper.
On top of that, the wind turbine sector is in big trouble as consequence.
Also, I should correct myself. It’s not an energy problem, as you pointed out. It’s an exergy problem we have. We now have much, much higher energy costs of energy doing anything economically valuable. That is why the cost of everything goes up, because energy is the master resource.
If the cost of energy rises inexorably, that means the economy gears itself to paying more and more of its discretionary income from said energy to produce more of it. This is why there is an exergy crisis, because, yes, there is oodles of energy about, but it matters not. It's like telling a sailor in a life raft not to worry about dehydration, he's literally floating on all the water he'll ever need!