Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "A Faster Way to Get to a Clean Energy Future | Ramez Naam | TED" video.

  1. I'm also an engineer (aerospace) who works in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. Everyone needs to be mindful of people who do these talks because even though they make many great 100% accurate comments they also either ignore inconveniencies, over simplify things or outright mislead. I've had some huge eye openers in the 30+ years since graduation. I'm Australian but did my degree in America and then came back here and spent over a decade in manufacturing. In 2002 I met Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt and he talked about mining the moon for Helium-3. So I went off to Australia's remote mining industry to learn about mining. The timing was sort of fortunate because we were building a bunch of new mines to supply China. Other than learning about mining the real benefit I got form that experience was a massive lesson in basic infrastructure including energy systems and water management. This guy is right on about 90% of what he's saying but he glosses over or ignores or just gets plain wrong a couple of things. That slide at 3:30 is BULLSHlT you cant have anything so many times less than something else unless you are comparing it to a 3rd item. You can only do a fraction or percentage. I truly hate anyone who does that because its so misleading. The other thing is he glosses over the minerals needed to make things like solar panel. YES I hate the clowns who usually scream about how much emissions from extracting these minerals are made, but they do have a point. These are things the Greenies are always ignoring. I have worked on both a copper mine and an an Alumina refinery and those are damn nasty energy intensive processes. Rare earths minerals are even WORSE and we need huge amounts of them for the high efficiency electric motors needed. He never even mentioned the issues with Lithium production and energy storage. There's 1.5 Billion registered cars and nearly 1/2 a billion registered trucks in the world. That's a massive task requiring a staggering amount of lithium to either replace them or replace their drive systems AS WELL AS GENERATING the electricity to power them. AND THAT does not even begin to address the energy needs of developing societies which he never even mentions. So despite the fact Ramez has a got a lot of important facts right he's also leaving out a lot that is just as important points. I'm not sure what sort of engineer you are but this is really import in any project you ever do. The problems that bite are rarely the things you are working on but the things you dismissed as less important.
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