this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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It’s way more than cars. Plastics, chemicals, energy, shipping, fertilizers, pesticides, even food additives can trace their ingredients to oil and gas. We’ve structured our whole society around oil since World War I, and getting out of it isn’t going to be easy.
A lot of it, is due to having waste products from refining crude oil, which could be turned into something usefull. So when you transition away from combustion engine cars, you increase the costs of other oil based products.
The reason those products were adopted was because the raw materials were available chaply as by products of fossil-fuel production. We'll have to substitute, and will still use some petroleum to produce feedstock for a while. But substitution, efficiency improvements and replacement are normal parts of a working economy. As fossil-fuel derivatives become more costly, we'll ditch them.
Shipping is a separate problem: the logistics and transport sector will be slower to decarbonize because of the long lifetimes of its capital goods.