Sometime during this century, it is highly likely that worldwide depletion of natural resources will force an entire reorganization of social and economic structures, perhaps violently.” — Walter Youngquist, ‘Our Plundered Planet’. We are going to have to dramatically downsize the dream of a future in which we replace 150-year-old fossil fuel infrastructure with “clean energy” by 2050.

That’s the message in a number of recent important reports and books. They underscore a number of problems with the renewables illusion, including the complexity of the task, the toxicity of rare earth mining and the scarcity of critical minerals.These grounded realists, including the French journalist Guillaume Pitron and the Australian geologist Simon Michaux, all have three basic messages:There are dramatic limits to growth. Truth and reality are not linear. And the world needs a better plan to avoid collapse other than replacing one unsustainable fossil fuel system with another intensive mining system powered by even more extreme energies. In other words, electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path.

‘Doubling down on the wrong thing’ For largely ideological reasons many greens and “transitionists” have presented the transition to renewables as a smooth road with no potholes. In so doing they have ignored much basic geology, energy physics and even geopolitics. As a consequence many imagine the construction of millions of batteries, wind mills, solar panels, transmission lines and associated technologies, but they downplay the required intensification of mining for copper, nickel, cobalt and rare minerals you’ve probably never heard of such as dysprosium and neodymium. One of the great lies of modern technological society is that of endless mineral abundance. Urban consumers, who have little knowledge of energy realities underpinning their existence, have swallowed the idea that digital gadgets and automation will somehow detach society from the physical world and allow us to do more with less, leading to a dematerialization of society. But that’s a wholesale fiction long debunked by the likes of the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil and the late geologist Walter Youngquist. The average North American citizen not only consumes 1.3 million kilograms of minerals, metals and fuels in their lifetime but has no idea where they come from or at what cost.The current global mining footprint is already “unsustainable” if that plastic word has any meaning left. In his book Extraction to Extinction the British geologist David Howe politely notes that current mining operations have now become their own geological force, scraping , sorting and collecting more dirt, rock and sediment than the world’s rivers, wind, rain and glaciers every year. But you can’t build solar panels, wind mills or electric cars without mining more copper, lithium, iron and aluminum along with the rare earth technology metals that only appear in small concentrations. That means vastly more destructive scraping and digging of ocean floors, rainforests and tundras on a scale inconceivable to most environmentalists.

Already the industrial global machine that serves our shop till you drop culture has dug up more materials and metals than the globe’s total living biomass. In other words our machines, cellphones, buildings, cars, asphalt roads, concrete, plastic, gravel and bricks started to outweigh the world’s plants, fungi, animals and bacteria by 2020. If we continue on this extractive course the pile of human mined materials on this groaning planet will triple global biomass by 2040. Will it really matter if we reach net-zero emissions by extinguishing the last remnants of biodiversity in the process, asksthe U.S. physicist Tom Murphy in a recent essay. He considers the current prescription for stopping climate change with a mining boom to support an industrial production of renewable technologies a dangerous course. “It’s doubling down on the wrong thing: propping up and accelerating the machine that’s eating the planet alive. Barrelling forward on renewable energy is the last thing Earth’s critters would vote for, and would be considered one of the more disruptive decisions we could make.”Murphy is far from alone in that assessment. After the U.S. renewables skeptic Alice Friedemann tabulated the mining costs of rare earth mineral mining needed for renewables, including enormous tailing ponds, poisoned groundwater, radioactive waste and volatile geopolitics, she flatly concluded, “Our quest for a more ecological growth model has resulted in intensified mining of the Earth’s crust to extract the core ingredient — rare metals — with an environmental impact that could prove far more severe than that of oil extraction.”....read on-there's much more      https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/04/07/Rising-Chorus-Renewable-Energy-Skeptics/               

And that's happening already in Alberta, Canada!.........Alberta’s Strange Double Standard on Green Energy. Solar and wind face tough rules, while fossil fuels Projects are banned on prime agricultural land, unless both crops and livestock can coexist with the wind turbines or solar panels. A ban on projects in 35-kilometre zones around what the government defines as “pristine viewscapes” has blocked wind project construction in those regions. The entire length of the Rocky Mountains is included in these buffer zones. Remember that!

Then there are the bonds or securities required by developers for reclamation costs. These stringent rules would make sense if they were consistent across the energy and resource board. They’re not. The Danielle Smith government seems to think renewables development presents a threat far greater than other, more established industries. There is a need for consistent regulation within the energy sector. Renewable energy should not be developed in sensitive ecosystems, or in areas with high biodiversity. However, these restrictions must be applied fairly across all sectors, including the oil and gas industry,” the statement said.

Unlike renewables, oil and gas is allowed on all agricultural classes in the province, according to the statement. That permission exists in spite of the huge amount of land and sacrifice of soil and water linked to oil and gas development.“It can take decades to remediate soils that are contaminated by oil and gas, during which the land cannot be used for farming,” it said.“ Decommissioning of oil and gas infrastructure is also a major concern, with cleanup costs estimated to be as high as $130 billion, while barely any security has been collected. Mandatory security requirements for renewable energy development must also apply to the oil and gas sector,” the statement said. Reviving the coal mines......Another industry treated with a gentle hand is coal. Despite its record of alarming environmental impacts, recent provincial willingness to open back up development on seemingly canned coal projects indicates a concerning ignorance to how harmful it can be for Alberta citizens. The categorization gives exemption to the ban on coal mining, meaning companies can continue with applications to mine in the area.....read on     https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/03/25/Alberta-Double-Standard-Green-Energy/

The building, which was completed in 2008 and financed by the Roman Catholic diocese of Oakland, cost $175m. But that price tag confounds Joseph Piscitelli.In the 1970s, Piscitelli attended a Catholic high school in nearby Richmond, where, from the age of 14, he experienced repeated sexual abuse at the hands of his vice-principal, an ordained priest. For decades, Piscitelli experienced nightmares and panic attacks. Friends who had also been abused turned to drugs and alcohol, and several took their own lives. In 2003, Piscitelli sued the Salesian College Preparatory high school and the Salesian order, and won. While the cases were decided in his favor in 2006, they had not held leaders at the top accountable. So, in 2020, he filed a new suit, this time against the Oakland diocese. Then, to Piscitelli’s dismay, the diocese declared bankruptcy in May. As a result, his case was put on an indefinite hold. One by one, various arms of the Catholic church across California have declared bankruptcy, citing an inability to pay damages from large numbers of sexual abuse lawsuits. The dioceses of Santa Rosa and Oakland filed in the spring. The archdiocese of San Francisco followed suit in August, and the diocese of San Diego has shared its plan to do the same in November. The lawsuits come at a time when Catholicism in California is growing – fueled in large part by immigration from Latin America and Asia – while other parts of the US, including former Catholic hubs in the north-east, are seeing their numbers dwindle. Church bankruptcy declarations are not unprecedented. From Portland to Milwaukee and from Helena to Rochester, dioceses have been declaring – and emerging from - chapter 11 bankruptcy for nearly two decades. And it isn’t only the Catholic church taking these steps. The Boy Scouts of America likewise sought protections amid thousands of sexual abuse allegations in 2020. The flood of California suits came after 2019 legislation opened a three-year “look-back window” that would allow survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file suits based on old claims that would normally have fallen outside the statute of limitations. When the window closed last December, more than 2,000 individuals around the state had filed cases against the Catholic church; 330 accusers have sued the Oakland diocese alone.

Declaring chapter 11 does not mean that the church is broke, said Marie Reilly, professor of law at Penn State University. Rather, it is a legal strategy undertaken by corporations that say they don’t have the funds to pay a high number of individual settlements. Known as “reorganization”, these bankruptcy protections let the church avoid undertaking dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of individual costly trials by grouping them into one settlement. “It will look like more of an administrative process,” said Reilly, who specializes in bankruptcy law and also created a database that tracks diocesan bankruptcies. But the church claims bankruptcy is also fairer to victims, primarily because it means each victim is treated equally and all survivors receive even payouts. “You see some of the settlements that are out there. You can almost use up all the funds on one or two settlements, and the rest of the survivors that have legitimate concerns get nothing,” said Peter Marlow, executive director of communications and media relations for the archdiocese of San Francisco. In 2019, the Los Angeles archdiocese paid $8m to a single abuse survivor. To date, settlements have cost California’s Catholic church more than $1b. o abuse survivors, the proceedings feel like a cop-out. “It’s just another way to silence us,” says Dan McNevin, who leads the Oakland chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (Snap) support group.

Unlike trials, bankruptcy proceedings do not involve a discovery process, meaning key pieces of information about what church leaders knew may never be revealed. McNevin knows how meaningful those revelations can be. As a child, he was an altar boy at his local parish in Fremont, south of Oakland, where he says he was groomed and abused by his priest. In 2003, following California’s first look-back window, he brought a suit against the diocese of Oakland, claiming it had knowingly shuffled his abuser from place to place to mask his crimes.When we discovered that he had been arrested, my case was made,” said McNevin. “It probably helped settle 60 cases.” But those cases were settled individually, not collectively, as they would be in bankruptcy proceedings – a critical difference to McNevin. “They’re going to try to slice and dice the survivors into categories,” he said. “How do you contemplate making those kinds of stark arbitrary decisions when every human being is different?”Melanie Sakoda, survivor support coordinator at Snap, says the removal of the discovery process results in victim retraumatization. “What they’re really looking for is information,” she said. “After waiting all these years before finally getting themselves together enough to come forward and file a lawsuit, it’s disappointing. And it makes people angry.”.....read on    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/12/sex-abuse-catholic-church-bankruptcy-oakland-califonia     

AND THERE'S MORE.......CHECK OUT........MinistryWatch’s Top 25 Stories of 2023 Here's a list of the Top 25 stories of the year, as ranked by the number of page views at the MinistryWatch website, plus the first few sentences for each story.........https://ministrywatch.com/top-25-stories-of-2023/     

And what are some examples of corruption in the Catholic Church? Over time, popes and bishops began selling indulgences as a way of raising money. This practice made it seem that people could buy forgiveness for their sins. Many Catholics were deeply disturbed by the abuse of indulgences. The Church has also sold offices, or leadership positions.  Vatican financial scandals: Corruption, stupidity or both? For Americans, making sense of the Vatican trial of 10 defendants charged with financial crimes is nearly impossible. The charges are a tangle of alleged corruption and misconduct. At the heart of the trial is a London luxury property investment that lost the Vatican almost $200 million. Then there are payments to a woman who was supposed to help free some nuns from kidnappers but allegedly spent the money on luxury goods, holidays and other extravagancies. https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/vatican-financial-scandals-corruption-stupidity-or-both

NOT NEARLY  ENOUGH WORLDWIDE CLIMATE ACTION! Record-breaking increase in CO2 levels in world’s atmosphere. Experts issue warning after finding global average concentration in March was 4.7ppm higher than same period last year. Guardian Oliver Milman  Thu 9 May 2024 The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet.

The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO2 levels over a 12-month period. The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Niño climate event, which has now waned, as well as the ongoing and increasing amounts of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. “It’s really significant to see the pace of the increase over the first four months of this year, which is also a record,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We aren’t just breaking records in CO2 concentrations, but also the record in how fast it is rising.” 

The global CO2 readings have been taken from a station perched upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii since the measurements began in 1958 under Keeling’s father, Charles. The concentrations of CO2 have increased each year since, as the heat-trapping gas continues to progressively accumulate due to rampant emissions from powThe global CO2 readings have been taken from a station perched upon the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii since the measurements began in 1958 under Keeling’s father, Charles. The concentrations of CO2 have increased each year since, as the heat-trapping gas continues to progressively accumulate due to rampant emissions from power plants, cars, trucks and other sources, with last year hitting a new global record in annual emissions.er plants, cars, trucks and other sources, with last year hitting a new global record in annual emissions.....read on https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-record   

And Checkout..... THE WORLD EMISSIONS CLOCK and Country by Country Status     https://worldemissions.io/?campaignid=20369193522&adgroupid=155060989647&adid=665839090473&utm_term=co2%20emissions%20by%20country&utm_campaign=World+Emissions+Clock&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=3460487076&hsa_cam=20369193522&hsa_grp=155060989647&hsa_ad=665839090473&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-489531936952&hsa_kw=co2%20emissions%20by%20country&hsa_mt=b&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwwO20BhCJARIsAAnTIVRcwfdm8_-LSdcjmq2QrPRYjgA0PLwSYLv2_XSNVOpRl7iTGtSGaiAaAg3PEALw_wcB