Grasp Extracted: How The Quest For Mineral Wealth Is Plundering The Planet: A Report To The Club Of Rome Scripted By Ugo Bardi Kindle
book will make you rethink everything around you, It talks of mining and depletion and it's really horrible to see what we've done and are still doing to the planet.
It clears up a lot of things, for instance it talks about what fracking is and why modern fracking is much more dangerous than fracking was a few decades ago.
It also talks about some solutions to the problems of depletion, It was really depressing but tried to be uplifting at times which is hard to do because it seems that the depletion problem is pretty obvious but instead of conserving resources we are using them up faster than ever.
There was a little too much talk of models for my taste because they would describe a model and then say how it didn't actually apply to the real world because it didn't account for a lot of other factors.
If a model doesn't apply to the real world I'm not sure why they would talk about it, I thought it was much more effective when they just showed data, This is a problem that Nicolas Nassim Taleb talks about in his book "the Black Swan" why use a model that has no bearing on real life Additionally a lot of the first part of the book was about history and gold trading in the Roman Empire and I felt that it wasn't that relevant to the subject at times, and this might dissuade readers from getting to the actual meat of the book, when it talks about depletion and modern mining.
I enjoyed all the small sideessays included but I'm not sure why they didn't just make them part of the main text.
At times they were actually more interesting and more informative than the main text as they applied to more specific subjects such as the difficulty of replacing all gasoline cars with electric cars in terms of the resources needed.
I thought this book was extremely informative and should be read by everyone in order to effect change on a larger scale.
In particular, politicians and those in charge of policy should be required to read this as it really clears up a lot of issues and looks at depletion from an objective point of view rather than a political one.
If you don't feel up to reading the whole book just skip the sections on history but in a perfect world everyone would read this book.
The science, history, mythology, and economics are all intertwined in the story of how humans extract resources from the planet.
Plants and animals have been extracting resources since life began, but only now do we extract more than the replenishment of the resources.
Going from how early philosopher views of the planet being a giant life form, Gaia, providing all the resources and helping regenerated the resources once extracted, to the actual science behind the resource formation.
After gravity collected massive rock, the heavy resources sank to the core, That means that after the formation of the planet, to have the variety of resources in the mantle, the earth must have been hit by a variety of meteors.
Many resources created via a cycle in extreme temperatures on the planter, while others are biological remnants,
Given the resources, Bardi goes through the history of how the resources were used, From tools to weapons to empires and money, the nuances and difficulties with extraction and application were provided, It took a lot of experimentation to find the proper application of many resources, With some regions having resources that other regions want, wars broke out,
A key to all the extraction problems is the energy needed to extract and refine them, Going from high grade ore to lower grade ones increases the amount of energy needed to extract the same amount of resources.
There is a finite amount of resources on the planet, but many will still be there for ages to come.
The extraction of many lowgrade regions will cost more energy than the energy the resources would provide,
There are many sources from were resources can be extracted such as mines, sea, fusion, space, and recycling.
Mines provide more access to high grade deposits, The sea contains a variety of resources, but separating them would be costly, With fusion, we have something of a magical machine that creates resources we need from other resources, Space rocks have resources, but most of the resources we use come from the interaction between living geological and biological formations, while space rocks are dead geologically and biologically.
The resources go into the products we use, after using products, some of the materials can be recycles again, but at cost to both resource function and the amount that can be extracted.
The sea, fusion, space, and recycling, can all help the industrial process continue producing high living standards, the problem is that the energy needed to extract resources from those sources, currently is or will always be much greater than the energy we get from them.
Changing production methods to reduce global warming is only part of the problem the planet it is facing.
The way humans live will drastically change to the resource contrast on production, With less production, maybe pollution and greenhouses gasses will be less of a problem, but humans will still face drastic changes.
The author has a chapter on a variety of ways to measure the depletion of resources, some of which have failed while other more successful.
Although many models have been wrong, it does not decrease the importance of the fact that depletion is unavoidable due to the limited supply of resources.
The models allow industries and people to prepare to adapt to either substitutes or limiting their use of the deleted resource.
One problem this book has is with economics, The author claims that many governments and corporations want to grow, Rather than focus on growth, we should be focusing on sustaining for we cannot grow forever with the limited resources we have.
The problem is that wealth does not require extraction resources, There is no requirement for wealth producing products to be tangible, Intangible services are part of the production process as well, Although we will need to extract resources to maintain the social structure, there will be less pressure to produce tangible products that are resource intensive.
The book is heavy with science and statistics, but the author writes with a prose that is easy to read without degrading the complicity of the issues.
Each chapter provides articles that are tangent to the story, but provide a different view of the concept under discussion.
These glimpses not only help make the topic more understandable, they also go deeper into a particular topic, The author does claim that humans can adapt, but adaption has a variety of limitations, Even through each resource can be used more productively such as using less of the resources per product, that is not enough to prevent major changes in society.
Many people have heard of “peak oil,” and are concerned that finite fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas cannot support our economy indefinitely.
But what about metals, like copper, gold, platinum, aluminum, and others Isnt there just a finite supply of those in the earths crust as well Do we have to worry about “running out” of metals
Well, actually we do, although its more complicated than the phrase “running out” implies.
This is the topic of Ugo Bardis clearly written and quite interesting book on minerals and how humans extract them.
He goes all the way back to the beginning, and I mean the VERY beginning, explaining how metals came to be found on earth.
This is not primarily about oil, coal, and gas, but they are included as well one interesting sidelight is his explanation of why fossil fuels can never be naturally formed again even if we wait hundreds of millions of years.
Bardi goes through the seven common metals of antiquity, and shows how metals were used in antiquity, through the industrial revolution, and down to the present day, when we use very exotic and rare metals for computer equipment as well as a lot of “renewable” technologies.
But we now also have problems getting phosphorus, which is essentially if we are to continue industrialscale agriculture, A number of "callout" sections, by other wellknown authors, deal with specific issues such as copper, rare earths, nickel and zinc, the Hubbert model, fracking, and so forth.
Bardi does a very good job of explaining the critical role of energy in mining, Basically, with an unlimited source of cheap energy, we can blast into lower and lower quality ores at the extreme, he considers the possibility of a “universal mining machine” which could extract minerals randomly distributed in ordinary dirt.
A “universal mining machine” has a number of problems, including the vast amounts of energy needed and the vast quantity of waste material created.
On top of that, with the decline of cheap energy and the diminishing supply of ores with rich concentrations of the metals we want, it appears that we really are approaching the limits of mineral extraction.
This poses fundamental problems for the future of humanity it is basically another “limits to growth” issue, Excellent book. Makes you think about current choices vs future consequences, If this book were written by Jane Austen, it would be called "Depletion and greedy",
This is the history of the planet Earth, how it was formed, how minerals came to be some are so special, they were formed at the explosion of nearby supernovae, how the humananimal started mining them and the state of things we are today the book brings data till around, so somethings got worse, maybe.
Minerals are finite resources we started mining in prehistory, At the first moment, it was the material our species could easily pick from streams or were easy to spot in their huntergathering walkabouts.
As agriculture came to be, allowing the emergence of stratified societies, more and more mining was necessary in order to achieve the goals of a society, that is, protection against foreign forces, development of new technologies, and so on.
But with the Industrial Revolution, it all changed, For worst. Mining for coal and metals was required to maintain the industries working and allowing "progress", Around that time, the discovery of oil and gas allowed industries to put King Coal aside for a long time.
With the great depression at the end of thes, the idea of producing obsolete goods came as a miracle to help economies to be able to evolve again.
And it did. But at what a cost!
Bardi and other contributors' aim is also to give us the state of things as they are now, pointing out that depletion is causing a bell curve concerning most of the minerals we've been mining, being that some of them are quite rare to find on Earth's crust Rare Earths elements, for instance, not to mention that for many of them there are no other alternatives.
When they are over, they are over, Some may be processed by Earth itself, like gold, but its return to the planet's crust might take millions and millions of years.
And considering that easy minerals to mine have long been gone, what is left is in a short number, with less quality and does require more and more energy to mine, thus, causing prices to rise with time.
The worst is that both industrialists
and the public in general, with few exceptions, do simply prefer to turn a blind eye and leave the burden to be solved and paid by future generations.
Bardi warns that there are many economists and scientists who say that our resources are infinite, But reality shows a different picture,
Depletion is a reality, and as long as we keep on this road, and no miracle alternative, like fission, happens to produce everlasting low price energy, we might be in a very serious.
Mining the Moon or Mars, . . just forget it. Extremely expensive.
And do add to it, we arebillion little greedy creatures who want to have all we can grab, but this is another sad reality that we must think much better and find solutions like reuse, avoiding achieving what we don't need, etc if we want the humananimal to keep evolving as a species.
For the future holds not much good news for us,
The book is quite interesting, though sometimes too repetitive, caused by the different texts by the contributors to the book.
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