this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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Do we not run on gas? I know we're transitioning, especially China https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars
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.
We're still using fossil fuels, and not phasing out as fast as possible.
Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though
The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy... no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.
Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn't important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?
The problem is crashing the economy will kill a lot of people right now, no need to wait or come up with a better solution
If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it's harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That'll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it's engineering, planning and politics.
Chinese power generation has produced more CO2 this year than ever before. They're also bringing renewables online, but electricity usage has risen too. So we're closer to turning the corner, but haven't done so yet.
https://youtu.be/zZ-lMDtiI-k?si=gAf8unl2IqUJXNBR USA and China both emit insane amounts of co2 but the population difference...