this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Not saying I disagree but methinks many of you don't realize everything we use fossil fuels for from plastic to fertilizer it's not just gas. You think costs are spiralling out of control now.... oooh boy just wait.
Society would change, a lot. I’d be very interested in what a plastic-phobic society would look like. Remember milkmen, who would take one empty glass bottle and give you a full one?
As in, billions will die? That is a big change indeed...
Yeah it's scary that people don't seem to understand that this would lead to billions dead which would cause chaos and resources wars that totally doom the planet.
We need infrastructure to transition, we need technological innovations and cultural stability
There is actually another myth: the planet will do just fine - it is the humanity that will die as the result. Not that we would care about this nuance at that point...
Not if we nuke it all into an irradiated wasteland in desperation.
That will take a few hundred million years to recover then. Not to the same biome, there will certainly be some crazy species popping up. From what i recall, Earth still has a few billion years before it is consumed by the Sun, should be ok.
It's possible to ruin the planet enough that the things supporting life, the ozone layer and the atmosphere for example, are wrecked beyond repair and that the planet becomes permanently lifeless. Sure, technically the planet will still exist, but so will every other dead rock in space.
Please do not put this as a KPI! Let's give cockroaches a chance.
We still have those!
I would love a return to milkmen tbh
That's true, we need fossil fuels for so many things besides transportation. At the same time, we are simply running out of fossil fuels. Even if we ignore the impact on the environment completely, there will be a point in the not too distant future when there will simply be nothing left to pump.
So what I am wondering is, even if one thinks man made climate change is a hoax or something similar, shouldn't the first and foremost thing everyone agrees on be to still spare those scarce resources? For things we really ("really") need to make from oil?
The first thing that comes to mind (maybe since I work in the lab) is medical equipment. You don't really want to have to wash and reuse things like catheters, do you? I am not sure if bioplastics (i.e., still plastics, but made from plants) would be an alternative here once we run out but I sincerely hope so.
Prices will go up, in any case, and it will be a painful transistion. But now we are at a somewhat luxurious point where we can still make this transistion somewhat controlled and "smoothly". If we continue to treat oil as a never ending resource and then do a surprised pikachu face once there is nothing left this will be much much worse, won't they?
We already know how to create plastics from CO2 extracted from the air and hydrogen from water. There is no shortage of raw material for plastics. The main question for the industry is cheap plastics and the answer to that has always been cheap oil and gas.
Using proven reserves and current consumption you get to 47 years and things run out. That's a "within my lifetime" number for many.
Nail on the head! It's not that we can't make products from something other than curde oil, it's just by far the cheapest. To a lot of people the economy is more important than the environment.
So my understanding out of this is that we need a government that takes responsibility and raises taxes on the cheap oil and gas to move the industry in the right direction. And we need a system where politicians aren't being paid by companies so they make decisions in their favor.
As a last point I'd like to mention that by that time there will be bio fuels and bio plastics. I am hoping that we will move to those within those 47 years.
We're working on all sorts of alternatives for fuels and for the plastics as you mention. I think we'll be fine as far as that's concerned. I agree that prices will go up and it will be hard. And it's up to governments to deal with these things responsibly.
The main issue is politics in a broken system and politicians being paid by companies that don't have our best interests in mind. How do we fight back?
Oh and trains. We need lots of trans because cleaning power supply is easier and cleaner than making batteries for trucks.
unfortunately the last two decades of discovery have provided ample petroleum and natural gas sources that won't be exploited unless we commit to fully and intentionally cooking the atmosphere.
we're not going to run out of petroleum, which will make it even harder to get people to leave it behind.
Say what now
We have plenty of rope with which to hang ourselves.
I wouldn't say we should get rid of all plastics. Some of it is required for medical purposes and food safety.
I would love for governments to grow some balls and start fighting against climate change. But in the case that that doesn't happen (and it probably won't because money). I would rather take price increase and inconvenience in exchange for a planet that's still livable in 100 years.
we could also use some responsible disposal rules for plastics to prevent them from ending up in our circulatory systems and oceans.
Plant based plastics are a thing.
Really, the only way we are going to ween ourselves off fossil fuels successfully is if they are more expensive than the alternatives. I hear shit like that all the time (big example is meat alternatives). Simply removing the subsidies that fossil fuels do enjoy would go a long way toward making them less attractive.
You're right, I think. But isn't that the entire problem ? government collusion with private interests ?
Long life oil based plastic products aren't so bad.
Meat alternatives are bullshit. We need meat*, and grass fed beef and lamb are probably carbon neutral, almost definitely carbon neutral if anything comes of the seaweed fix for their methane emissions
And yes, kill government support for the oil industry and uses for the oil. Animals are going to be important for providing fertiliser for fields that abandon industrial stuff
*We can survive without it, we can do well with bacterial sourced creatine supplements, but we thrive on real meat
Meat alternatives are perfectly fine. And tons of people do perfectly fine with zero meat at all and thrive just as much as people who eat meat daily. I have no qualms with eating meat since I do but let's not kids ourselves and say it is a necessity.
The big problem with beef is the amount of land and resources it takes. It takes a fuck ton of water and feed to get a pound of beef. The added carbon from beef is largely due to transportation of the feed, electricity, and also transportation of it on its way to the store. If that were all green sources, cattle would basically be carbon neutral. We are a long way from that though. And even if the energy sources for those were green, the other resources they eat up leads to massive destruction of environments.
Animals can certainly play a part in sustainable farming but the amount we currently have is absurd and is nowhere near sustainable. Just killing the subsidies alone would bring it significantly closer to sustainable. If the US stopped providing subsidies for the cattle industry, beef would be $35/lb.
Veganism is unhealthy
The land used for beef isn't useful for anything else. In Australia it's arid grasslands. We can't eat grass, sheep and cows can turn grass into wool and milk and meat
Transportation of feed is not a factor in grass fed, grass finished animals
Who said anything about veganism? You do know that being a vegetarian is not the same as being vegan, right?
If the beef industry was largely composed of grass fed cattle that requires no grass to be watered, there would be much less of an issue. But that only makes up a small percentage of the industry. And saying that grassland is not useful for anything ignores the ecosystem that is already there. It may be arid but it is not devoid of life.
But forcing a sustainable model and removing subsidies would absolutely go a long way toward mitigating the environmental impact of the beef industry since beef would likely be USD $70/lb.
A statement like "veganism is unhealthy" is so objectively wrong that it really harms your credibility in general. I wonder how much you actually read from the article, or did you just grab the title and run with it?
There are a small number of specific nutrients that are readily available in meat that are harder to come by in a vegan diet. Harder but entirely possible, especially with supplements.
And many of the meat alternatives that you were disparaging earlier are specifically engineered to provide those nutrients (in particular Impossible and Beyond brands).
"Veganism is unhealthy" in the same way that any eating pattern is unhealthy if you aren't mindful of what you're eating. Conventional meat-based diets have much higher risk of heart disease due to high cholesterol, so let's go ahead and label that unhealthy too.
If you think prices will be high without the use of fossil fuels, oooh boy just wait for the coming climate collapse that will obliterate all modern agriculture, create billions of climate refugees, decimate human civilization as we know it, and end all global supply chains.
Almost all of the things have fossil fuel free alternatives and the out of control costs are mostly from corporate greed. Strict but fair price controls would enable a society that can afford not to use fossil fuels for all but a few things.