Dead dinosaurs are one-time-use batteries

This is an excellent movie-length discussion of how inefficient it is to continue to subsidize fossil fuels, which are disposable fuels. He discusses “opex” (operational expenditures) vs. “capex” (capital expenditures). Over the medium- to long-run, an energy infrastructure with lower “opex” will win out.

“We should stop growing corn to feed to cars.”

You are being misled about renewable energy technology. by Technology Connections (YouTube)

The author discusses how modern solar panels no longer use hazardous materials, being composed primarily of materials derived from quartz.

Even the batteries can benefit from the existing nearly closed loop already established for recycling car batteries. Modern batteries can be used for 15 years, day-in, day-out, before they start to degrade. Fossil fuels can be used once. Even degraded batteries still contain all of their original materials—they’ve just been moved around within the battery to suboptimal positions. These can be recycled and made into new batteries. This means that, once we have a certain number of batteries, we no longer need to dig up the materials to build them.

From the last half-hour, which goes into other topics,

“Launching satellites into space to make rural broadband happen is an admission of laziness and defeat from both Big Telecom and the government. It’s a solution a billionaire could provide and happily monetize, but it’s not necessarily the best solution, is it?”

00:00 Intro
07:35 Some opening notes
10:14 Cars and all the oil they use
15:38 Photovoltaics and electric cars
18:59 A cost and opportunity comparison
22:33 Solar farms
30:35 A discussion of land use
38:29 A diversion on wind power
41:17 The materials in solar panels
50:52 What about the batteries?
1:02:41 The reasons I made this video
1:10:16 The reason I am who I am
1:16:35 Who the liars are and what we need to do about them.