The Unsustainable Green Transition | Simon Michaux

When my parents saw trouble on the horizon they didn't continue to live beyond their means. They prepared for tighter times. They made do with what they had, they did away with the excesses, they grew more food, they foraged more, the borrowed, repaired, loaned and bought only what we needed. They explained to us why we were tightening belts and our parents, neighbours, our communities included us and our environment in these activities. We all supported each other we, got on our bikes and we made things more sustainable. We sowed solidarity and we reaped hope.

Our Fiat Currency is the PetroDollar - it's tied to energy and genocide. That's why Noam Chomsky predicted the U.S. would invade Iraq again. I wrote a graduate paper based on Chomsky - in 1998 - predicting the U.S. would invade Iraq again. My instructor commented my paper was "too aggressive." - hilarious. So I printed out a couple hundred copies of my paper and passed them out at the University - and I hung a banner on campus, "Stop U.S. Genocide in Iraq" - and the University center of Genocide director walked past me to complain that it was not genocide in Iraq. haha. I got arrested twice to protest against the U.S. led sanctions on Iraq. The Two-Headed Depleted Uranium Babies of Iraq are the future of our renewable economy.

I love that you ask “what does that mean?”. Your podcast becomes more accessible and understandable. Great work, thanks 😊

"information rich" really is an understatement. I went through the almost 1000 pages report, Prof. Michaux published; it's all 100% worked out, but it takes a PhD in Physics to grasp the scale of all of it (which I happen to hold). I AM really impressed by the depth of his work, and as much as I dislike the conclusion, it's absolutely undeniable. Also aout calculating the storage capacity: that actually IS my job, and it all comes out at roughly the same value, you NEED 1/5 of your annual consumption, to cover the shortfall of January to make it to spring (I calculate for Germany, in Finland it's worse). 28 days of storage capacity indeed is too little. I come out at 70 days, no matter how I try to tweak the numbers. And including surge power, not only energy makes everything even more complicated. Feasable, but we are way too late to produce and install all the hardware. I cooperate with a local energy supply company. They see no way, to install, what would be required soon enough. The Hirsch report of 2005 was right: we are way too late, to build a live-boat before the Titanics upper deck meets the water line....

Every minute of this interview was riveting and enlightening for me. Please invite him back again soon. Thank you for the ongoing education, Rachel. Your podcasts are among the finest on YouTube.

It is quite technically possible to repair the pipeline, just not possible politically.

Making it worse: planned obsolescence manufactured into our current cell phones & computers hastens the use of the rare minerals. Also appliances last half as long as they did 30 years ago. (In the US). I'm curious if it's the same elsewhere. There should be quality/longevity laws here, but there aren't.

Peter Zeihan had a recent short update where he talked about Germany (and most of Europe) surviving the winter mostly through being lucky with the mild weather. Also, they imported something like half a trillion (dollars? euros?) worth of fossil fuels to replace the usual Russian supplies. If that amount of money had been invested in nuclear power generation instead, they could have completely replaced all their current coal and other power infrastructure with non-polluting power [assuming that you could magically construct a bunch of power plants in under six months fo course]. (Caveat: Zeihan is a bit like ChatGPT, in that he sounds authoritative, but you never know if he is accurate, using hyperbole, or just making up the numbers.)

1:15:00 YES - finally someone mentioning Permaculture as literally the only viable solution and backed with science and engineering!

Quote of the video: "Say you have a gold ring on your finger. To mine enough gold for that ring results in three tons of mining waste."

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without

Love Simon Michaux. Wonderful interview!

We all keep hearing about the necessity to conserve and manage our energy resources. The problem arises when the least among us do the managing. Government is renown for it's incredible inefficiency who worry mostly about bureaucracy expansion and self aggrandizement.

Derrick Jensen has it right, the only way to fix things is to adopt a lower-energy lifestyle for everyone.

I like this host. She is sharp and knows her stuff, but she is not afraid to ask questions when she doesn't know something Simon talks about. Most hosts pretend and just nod their head when they haven got a clue. So she digs in and gets the answers in lay terms which is good for us. And as for Simon, the guy is a genius, but a practical one, who actually knows how to add up. It's a crying shame (but not surprising) that all the academics in the world couldn't do some simple math and realise we don't have the minerals to do the net zero bullshit. I have seen many of Simons presentations and some of them are staggering. To think it will take 7100 years to mine the vanadium we need for storage batteries, and 9900 years to mine the Lithium for EV batteries is an eye opener.

Wow, this blows 99.999% of interviews out of the water.

Simon is one of my favorites.

Simon is awesome! Glad Rachel had him back

Politicians are not followers of what is popular, they are followers of the money.

Totally agree with the lack of contact the financial world has with reality... Bill Rees talks about the need our stories have in mapping accurately reality and neoliberalism or more generally the stories of our economics don't map onto reality at all... On the energy transition mining energy requirements i knew this 15 years ago when i did the energy profiles for a number of mines in NSW in Australia ... It's a shocking story emerging on how little work has been done on the energy transition 😢