For certain values of 'okay'. There is no doubt that oil and plastics have been hugely beneficial in many respects. The problem is that the cost is now apparent and we must stop gorging on them. Reduction in plastic and oil can only be a good thing but let's not pretend it doesn't require substantial changes in the way that we all live - its not just disposable straws here.
Reading the article, the projection is that this could "cut petrochemical demand growth to one-third of its historical pace, to about 1.5% a year".
That's good enough. I don't want to see reduced growth rate. I want to see shrinkage.
> That's good enough. I don't want to see reduced growth rate. I want to see shrinkage.
Perhaps you mean that's not good enough?
I, too, want to see the oil industry shrink. To my mind, it's downright dangerous to devote such a large part of the global economy to an industry that is literally putting our planet in peril.
The larger conversation we need to have, however, is what a post- growth economy should look like.
> let's not pretend it doesn't require substantial changes in the way that we all live
Actually, I don't really believe this. I do use/consume a lot of plastic, but I find in practice that in the vast majority of cases, the decision to make those items from plastic is an arbitrary one. The market has made decidision on my behalf, and provided me with a range of plastic options, with very few non-plastic options, for an application that has no hard dependency on plastic.
Electronics would be one of the big ones, and can largely be (and often are) made with aluminium* casings. Fittings have similar metallic alternatives. PCBs are something of an exception here: yes, there are aluminium/metallic substrates, but even those are epoxy-insulated.
Most other plastic uses are similar stories: we're provided with a range of exclusively plastic choices by the market, but that doesn't make it necessary on the production end.
Plastic is usually cheaper, yes, but this is a result of a long chain of subsidies, wars, and other market interference. This doesn't reflect true production cost.
* Worth noting, the environmental impact story for aluminium/other metals isn't too great either, but that's a separate topic.
You don't need subsidies for injection molded plastics to be massively cheaper to produce than any comparable material. Machining aluminum is very expensive, and die casting metal requires much more expensive tooling than plastics.
Also the choice to use petrochemical plastic rather than plant derived plastic or some equivalent non-plastic is mostly "because it's there". The industry exists, so its products are cheaper in the supply chain, so by the time you get to consumer level all the decisions have been made and it's the only choice offered.
Well the world is bigger than your view, needs or experience. There are many industrial appliances where plastics is not only cheapest, but also the overall best solution. Same would go for example for medicine.
Can it be fully replaced? Yes, but it will really take quite a bit of effort, or even going back to already phased out tools and materials.
I think you may have misinterpreted my post: I think we agree.
It would take an almost impossible effort (I'm not optimistic) on the part of industry. The only point I was rebutting is that our day-to-day consumer needs could not be met without plastic without significant lifestyle change by private individuals. I don't believe that this is true.
But yes, the change required on an holistic level is pretty much insurmountable.
The true cost of plastic is cheaper by far than aluminum or other alternatives. Injection molding and other plastic technologies are miraculously productive and energy efficient compared to many other forms of production.
> If you are saying that the total cost of the Iraq war should be rolled into the cost of plastic widgets, I think you are very wrong.
I am saying that. I'm also saying the cost of the lifecycle of plastic production and recycling/disposal, including environmental cost (which we have plenty of proxies for these days in terms of representing using economic metrics) should be rolled in.
(and yes, the same goes for aluminium: it too has ancillary costs to consider)
Extremely unlikely any of us alive now will be alive to see it. Oil is just far too useful for us to be able to replace easily, and choosing not to replace it would take our lifestyles back hundreds of years. Hardly anyone wants that.
Oil may be the easiest solution to the original problem. If there were no oil, would there have been a different solution that might have been as easy?
Up until the sixties or seventies asbestos was just far too useful to be replaced easily.
It was used everywhere - as filler, as insulation, as fire retardant, and was so cheap it even got used as bulking agent, as fake snow for Xmas and in packaging. We got rid of it in new applications in just a few years once it was realised that the health cost was far in excess of its utility. It costs thousands to rip out some of the old insulation in buildings, especially where it's part of the fabric of the building.
Lead in petrol was far to useful to be replaced, etc etc...
I just think it's part of the new innovation debt coming due. It's only now coming due for plastics and oil and the extreme cost of profligate unconstrained use is starting to be realised.
It's basically a hubristic mistake to take "this substance is useful!" as sufficient justification to introduce it as a novelty in huge amounts without considering its whole lifetime flow through the world's cycles, physical and biological.
It comes from thinking of the planet as infinite and able to absorb anything thrown into it, rather than a closed cycle life support system.
I'm not justifying anything and probably agree with you and NeedMoreTea in general. That said, asbestos and lead are barely comparable. Virtually every aspect of modern life is currently dependent on oil. You live in houses built with oil, wash yourself in water cleaned and transported in no small part with oil, drive on roads built with oil, wear clothes created with oil in one way or another, and eat food grown with oil. To think that we can unwind the phenomenally deep and complex interweaving of oil into the global economy in short order without massive disruption is not realistic.
I'm no fan of oil either, but let's not get carried away.
The 1900s were deeply enmeshed with horses. The 1900s - 1950s with coal.
A house need not depend on oil - bricks can still be fired and glass made from carbon neutral electricity, pipes can be copper, and drainage use ceramic like was used until the 80s. Similar for transport, water treatment etc. Perhaps a few specialised uses of PVC and other plastics will remain and the rest go - regulated or priced from existence. Now 95% of coal and horses aren't around we still keep stables for fun, some still enjoy horse racing, steam trains run at weekends and museums run a few steam engines.
Thing is the assumption that the planet could take everything thrown at it used to work - now population has grown so much that no longer applies. JulianMorrison has a point that "it's useful" can no longer be enough - stuff isn't only used by a few wealthy types any more, on a planet with under 1bn, whilst most of those engage in agriculture. We have to learn to consider damage control and restriction far sooner than was necessary even in the 1930s.
My worry is the modern dogma to not want to impact business at all costs. Governments avoid strong regulation, requiring consideration of the land a business occupy, the pollution and waste they cause or the people whose needs they should serve. Essentially they became subservient to multinationals. It will make changing that much harder and fought against much more - not least by those oil interests.
Not easy, but not impossible either. There is precedent after all. :)
Again - I don't disagree we need to change, but I think we need to be honest about the scale of the disruption involved. Think about the amount of debt in the world, and imagine that that was created with the foundation of an oil based economy, and then imagine what would happen if that foundation were removed. We are talking potentially catastrophic economic crisis, with all the problems that would bring.
The final thing I would say is that if those in control are sincere about tackling climate change, an open borders immigration policy is a very strange thing for them to be promoting. Instead of supporting people to live good lives where they are - in low carbon countries - we are encouraging them to move to high carbon countries, and effectively creating a reason to generate massive amounts of carbon through house building, infrastructure etc. This is one of the main reasons I am sceptical about the messages that come down from on high, and even more so given that the stock response to this issue is accusations of racism etc.
Seems crazy pessimistic. We could use HUGELY less plastic without a major impact. Start with clothes, get rid of all nylon, polyester, and plastic based materials. World changing? Hardly.
Get rid of plastic forks, spoons, knives, and straws... again no big deal.
Get rid of plastic used in food. Milk jugs, processed food, tv dinners, plastic bags of lemons/potatoes/etc. Kill off water bottles (which are a waste anyways), soda packages in plastic, cheap boxed wine, etc.
Sure there's some harder things, like say fertilizer, car interiors, toys, keyboards, mice, watches, network cables, etc. But still we could hugely reduce are use of oil.
Sadly the world was just starting to move away from oil a bit, then USA went from a large oil importer, to a huge exporter and the prices dropped.
I doubt the world would have been able to enjoy such a technological progress in general without oil to even have computers and be able to post comments on here for example.
Not denying that the oil industry hasn't got any sins.
And that's just one of the many ways that hydrocarbons are woven into critical parts of the global economy.
You can't just snap your fingers, make oil go away and expect modern civilization to keep existing as it currently does.
It took ~150yr to get the oil industry where it is today and that is with a massive financial incentive. People need lubricants, tars, fuels, plastics, everything that oil makes cheaply and well. In the absence of strong organic (not artificial, i.e. regulatory compliance) incentives to stop using oil it will almost certainly take much longer than 150yr to reduce oil usage for energy/fuel to negligible levels. We will likely never stop using oil for plastics, fertilizers and other "critical to modern civilization" things until something that's cheaper and equivalent or better comes along for every last use case.
Keep in mind that whatever we have next will have tradeoffs too.
Oil-the-chemical and oil-the-fuel can be considered seperate products. Demand-wise, all uses besides fuel are trivial. Even plastic is only 4%. The spritz of 10W-40 on my bike chain is of 0 consequence compared to the gallon of gas burned in a typical daily commute by car. We're never going to run out of oil for all those important non-fuel uses. Even if every oil well ran dry tomorrow, oil-the-chemical is quite easy to make from carbon waste feedstock.
I don't think it's right to estimate such a long time for oil to become obsolete as a fuel, just because we use it for other things too.
Without artificial fertilizers, soil depletion can stop and we can start using various permaculture farming techniques instead that can be sustained long term.
The Haber-Bosch process is not dependent on fossil fuels. With renewable sources (biogas instead of methane for H2 generation) the process is more expensive, but there are no technical limitations here that mandate the use of fossil fuels.
With advances in biotech and possible harnessing of biological nitrogen fixation we might overcome even this...
This comment means that you don't completely understand the full scope of what the oil industry does. I say that as someone who wants to see less dependence on the oil industry.
Keep in mind plastic is ~4% of oil consumption and burning it is 87%. Meaning it really doesn't matter if they get strong growth in their plastics or even the entire petrochem division, the overall companies need to be bankrupted, nationalized, broken up and unwound ASAP.
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I have a not good surprise for you. Someone started looking for it and there's spots of high density of plastic waste (equivalent to the infamous Pacific garbage patch) and it's not at the surface.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/ocean-mi...
As far as I know, most modern plastics are made out of natural gas, not oil. I guess you could still call natural gas companies as "oil companies", after all there's overlap.
I'm not an expert, but anecdotally my uncle is a chemist at a company that makes plastics and they make all of theirs from natural gas. They do not drill, refine, or otherwise use oil.
Pretty much, yes. Those projections are extrapolations from past numbers and don’t consider any potential drastic political actions to stop that growth, but given the total lack of enthusiasm to make such measures happen, they’re probably pretty accurate.
I knew that at the time of the Paris Agreement. Even that was too little, too late. It was wishful thinking that doing that little would make the difference that they said needed to be made. ("They" being the people proposing and negotiating the agreement.)
In a word, it wasn't a serious attempt. It may have been the most that could be successfully negotiated, but it wasn't a serious attempt at actually solving the problem.
I hate this backlash because it's just "greenwashing". People think they're virtuous because they didn't use a half gram plastic straw, and then burn a quarter ton of jet fuel traveling by air. A single plane flight uses more oil than a lifetime's worth of single-use plastics, but people have no intuition for the numbers. And people have a limited capacity for doing good, so by thinking these vastly different harms are similar they can do great harm by trading between them.
Single use plastics are responsible for big savings in food waste and transport (which is still almost entirely fossil fuel based). They improve people's quality of life for a very small cost in oil. The only significant problem is a small minority of people disposing of them improperly, and the only reason people even care about that is because of emotive reporting showing dead animals (nobody cares about all the animals killed by air pollution and climate change).
The solution isn't banning single use plastics, it's enforcing existing laws against littering. Enforcement can be funded by a tax on the plastics.
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The problem is that the plastic straw will still be polluting the environment in 10,000 years. Getting macro plastics out of the environment is difficult getting microplastics may be impossible. At some point we have to accept that single use plastics have an environment cost that is totally unacceptable.
As for emotive press stories about dead animals being the only reason people care. Did you know that the average human meal contains microplastics now? That your body contains microplastics right now?
CO2 also pollutes the environment for thousands of years.
"About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." --IPCC AR4
There are natural processes that remove CO2. There are no natural processes that break down plastics to a safe form.
EDIT: To be clear I am not saying that it is harmless to release lots of CO2 I am saying that we can't compare pollutants by simply looking at the gross tonnage released.
Hopefully, in the timescale of 10,000 years, we'll have refined plastic eating bacteria and the like to get rid of microplastics. It makes more sense to worry about a 20-100 years timescale.
Should probably be abolished anyway. But as long as the outside was dry, and the inside didn't have plastic-eating organisms, then it would still work.
Besides, the assertion wasn't that plastic would still be useful for everything. It just wouldn't be useless.
Using alternative to plastics sounds like a much easier and better solution than trying to stop littering.
Same way than having shorter circuits to reduce transport, or packaging at the end of the chain, or even smarter selling unpackaged good is a much smarter way to deal with transport pollution.
I love this backlash and I'm really happy to try to my small contribution
Plastic bag bans and similar movements are about increased quality of life too! We need to avoid the either-or mentality that arises in discussions like this. We can have a shared economy that prioritizes value for consumers and care for our ecosystems, but we need to expand our imaginations with regard to what's possible.
The backlash is entirely justified. There's way too much plastic waste, and too much of it is ending up in our oceans.
Plastic vs fuel is not an either/or thing: they're both problems. We probably can't eliminate either of them completely, but we should try to cut back on both as much as we can.
A tax on plastic packaging would be a very good idea.
>The best thing about these bans is they are very visible and raise awareness, giving you the critical mass you need to solve other issues too.
I think it's more likely to reduce the chance of solving other issues because it uses up people's mental charity budget. Humans are not naturally utilitarian, and good causes compete with each other based on emotion. There's a huge risk of scenarios like this:
>Save the poor orphan puppies!
"Sure, they're cute. Take all the money."
>Repair the historic building!
"Eh, I guess it's important. Here's a small donation."
>Feed the starving children in Africa!
"Didn't we do that already? Not my problem."
>Prevent the death of billions through climate change!
"I'm sick of all these demands. I'm going to start rolling coal just to spite you."
We need to focus on numbers, not emotion, and the numbers don't justify the backlash.
The oceans are being polluted with plastics at an alarming rate and will be littered for thousands of years without human intervention. And littering isn't the big problem, it's the broken system/lifecycle of plastics which doesn't have a safe, efficient way of disposal, reuse, or breakdown.
Even if you take every plastic and drop it into a bin, you're either going to burn it or dump it. Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it. Until we have a proper process for disposing plastics safely and cleanly, we must reduce using it in the ridiculous way we're using it. Single-use plastic bag should never be used if you have a way to use a reusable cloth bag instead.
> Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it.
Because people in the first world won't stand for modern incineration plants. The NIMBYs who would personally be negatively affected spread FUD about a .00001% increased chance of getting cancer or some crap like that.
Burning trash in general is a damn good way to get rid of it. You're left with ash which takes up a fraction of the space and is much easier to contain than the original trash product. Sure, it emits some nasty stuff but when you run an incinerator in the first world you can scrub that out of the exhaust. When you ship that stuff to the 3rd world you lose oversight of what happens to it.
Plastics cannot be reduced to their CO2 impact, they cause tremendous damage to marine animals, they are pollutants themselves, they release endocrine disruptors in the environment, they can persist many many years in the soil and water. The equivalence you imply is not valid.
> The solution [is] enforcing existing laws against littering
That's the classic industry argument: it's not their fault if there is pollution, it's the end users that irresponsibly throw stuff away. Ignoring their heavily-funded lobbying to avoid plastic reduction laws and minimize recycling obligations.
The greenwashing is the anti-littering laws and bodies.
Vermont was planning to introduce laws to require reuse of drinks bottles in the 1950s. Coca Cola, Philip Morris, Budweiser and others clubbed together to form and fund "Keep America Beautiful" to advertise and lobby for the problem to be landed on the consumer instead of the businesses that created the problem.
The solution is putting blame back on the producers, where it belongs. Require them to own that externality they created. Oh, and discouraging litter.
Are people really 'trading' these things? That seems like a bit of a stretch.
I'm having a hard time imagining somebody justifying flying more/further because they aren't using plastic straws in their day-to-day life.
Surely we can work to improve the world on multiple fronts at a time, and if single-use plastics present themselves as both unsustainable long-term and a low-hanging fruit (compared with air travel) in terms of sourcing replacements, then it's reasonable that people would seek to make that small change independent of what is happening in the rest of their lives.
I find this trend of slapping "virtue signalling" on all but the most lofty goals to be a bit disingenuous. It must assume that there is one section of society that is empowered to make all of these changes and that by choosing to pursue single use plastics they suffer the opportunity cost of not developing an alternative means of rapid transport or improved environmental law enforcement.
A single-use-plastic tax which truly takes into consideration the cost of enforcement / cost to the environment and landfill / depletion of a finite resource would have the same effect, sure.
I'm not convinced it would escape the "virtue signalling" label, though.
Once we shift to electric cars, people of the future will be wondering in amazement how did we ever tolerate combustion engines! Same way we now wonder in amazement how people in the past tolerated horse manure on the street or steam trains in subways...
Electric cars still need power - hopefully wind and solar, but most likely also nuclear, and fossil. If one would be to calculate the pollution cost of creating materials to build all the new power sources (wind, solar, nuclear) to support nearly 100% electric mobility, I wonder how it stands against current fossil-powered transportation.
I do agree with you, although my point is mostly from a public health angle, at least in the beginning stages of transitioning to fossil-free power generation.
Sorry, what does it mean? I'm only familiar with the term when it comes to currencies...
I think electric cars centralise the problem of air pollution, which in turn makes solving the problem from a centralized place more efficient and can be improved as technology improves.
It's like when centuries ago, urban places didn't have sewers and just let the excrement flow down the open gutters on the street (we are here with combustion engines). In time, sewers were built, but the untreated sewage would flow in to rivers & oceans (similar to as if electric cars became the norm now). In time, sewage treatment plants were also built (power generation shifts to fossil fuel-free).
Same way as we now look at open sewers in disgust, I'd say down the future we'll probably look at combustion engines in disgust and say "how the heck did people live like that?"
Yes, that. One source of electricity is as good as another to the car, so once cars are converted to EVs, the problem of pollution can be solved without involving them.
"Fungible" means that one unit is replaceable by any other unit. You have a dollar? Do you really care if I swap that for a different dollar? No, you really don't.
It's the same with kilowatt-hours. I don't care where it came from as long as it's 1) available and 2) within spec.
I think people will be wondering in amazement that we were so wasteful in ferrying around 200-lb bags of water and flesh in 1-ton carriages of steel, when buses and trains and bikes and scooters where already well-known about and available.
It's not so wonderous when you consider the trillions in subsidy, lobbying against alternatives, free pollution rights, and infrastructure designed for the 2 ton wheel chairs we call cars
I'm also amazed that so many aspects of our lives are created from stuff that we extract from Earth instead of building a sustainable and renewable source of it. Oil is used in everything from asphalt that we lay on roads to polymers in medical drugs. Just looking around, so much stuff in our daily lives is made from oil that it's difficult to imagine how the world would look after all of it is moved to a sustainable manufacturing when oil starts to run out or for people living on Mars.
Electric cars contribute significantly less to climate change, and the degree to which that is true increases as we shift our electric grids more toward renewable sources.
There are certainly issues with the mining of rare earth and other minerals required to build all the batteries, but a) they are not, by and large, carbon issues, and b) there are some promising new battery technologies that would use fewer of these resources coming along within the next decade or so.
Don’t make the mistake of seeing it as a binary thing: electric cars are not perfect, all-natural devices that cause no environmental issues from conception to disposal, but they are, on balance, much better than internal-combustion engines, especially for climate change, which is the really big environmental issue most likely to cause problems for human civilization.
Your first two points are great. Your third is a wickedly pernicious lie. I'm assuming from the context of your first two points that was not your deliberate intention.
Imagine for a moment that coal, oil, gas, metals, rare earth elements, lithium, etc etc were all simply an interchangeable concept of "bad mass". Meaning, we need the mass to do something, but the process of mining/extracting/producing it has bad side affects.
One way of doing things, the bad mass is produced and consumed on a constant basis. The gas in your tank is used exactly once.
The other way of doing things the bad mass is produced and re-used for roughly a decade, after which it can be recycled. The lithium in your EV battery will get used several thousand times in its first life, a few hundred more in a secondary application, and then recycled for who knows how many more uses.
So simply from a "consumed" vs. "re-used" basis the process of mining lithium (and cobalt etc) would have to be thousands and thousands of times worse than the process of drilling/extracting/refining oil just for them to break even.
It is good and important to recognize that simply replacing ICEs with EVs is closer to harm reduction than problem-solving, but it is a very very large harm reduction so statements like "electric cars aren't any better for the environment given all the mining" retard that harm reduction.
That’s a very compelling way of thinking of it. The batteries can be reused. And when super capacitors show up we won’t need as much in the way of heavy metals, no?
This is a good point. But electricity is still largely produced by fossil fuels. So if one is selling an efficient (30+ mpg) ICE car that they own to buy a new EV, the math may make less sense. At least for the short to medium term, anyway.
Individual marginal efficiency arbitrage is the wrong mental framework for analysis of the problem at hand. We are not trying to burn carbon more efficiently, we are trying to stop burning carbon. We are not optimizing, we are solving for zero. An EV run on coal today will automatically inherent the solution as we decarbonize the grid.
I so wish we could duplicate a pomegranate shell or an orange skin. Such materials would be great for packaging. I have seen pomegranates and certain varieties of oranges last for more than two months when stored in cool and dry places.
In South Africa at this point I am more excited about air-to-hydrocarbon technology than electric cars. Personally I would love an electric car, but long travel distances and issues with our state owned utility make modular (powered by solar or at some places wind) fuel producing facilities very promising—provided that this technology actually exists!
It seems like we don't know for sure whether air-to-fuel startups actually have a cost effective way of fixing hydrocarbons from the air or whether they are just trying to lure investor money.
Look as a geek i'm interested in and irrationally optimistic despite the odds about air-to-fuel stuff like prometheus.
But as a grownup. As a responsible adult. As someone who passed high-school math. You have to look at the challenge we face, and the timeframe we have to address it, and say "oh, time's up."
We don't get to play the "i'm hoping for X" technology game anymore. That phase is over. It's time, now, to shift everything we can as fast as we can using the things we have and know.
Hopefully air-to-fuel r&d gets somewhere in a decade, and hopefully it can be commercialized quickly thereafter. That'd be great. It would go a very long way toward saving the airline and international tourism industries. But w/r/t cars, TIME IS UP.
So yes, what I am saying is I appreciate the arguments around practicality, urgency and time frames; at the same time I see a lot of institutional inertia.
A basket of technologies is to me a better determinator for progress (or shift, if you prefer).
The main focus in developing countries is foremostly on the human front: basic needs, personal security, health care, etc. It's does not make sense to me to expect the switch to electric cars to make or break general progress. Air-to-fuel alternatives are very attractive as a basket of "energy goods". I can see companies here setting up their own production centres. At the same time the existing infrastructure can benefit (such as large oil pipelines, the existing car and truck fleet, power generators and peak energy production, etc.).
Don't misunderstand, I think electric cars would be a better future (nitrous oxide byproducts, I am looking at you). Air-to-fuel tech is a great supporting basket item.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadReading the article, the projection is that this could "cut petrochemical demand growth to one-third of its historical pace, to about 1.5% a year".
That's good enough. I don't want to see reduced growth rate. I want to see shrinkage.
As in, there might be a lot of downsides to reducing or getting rid of plastic use, but the fall of oil giants is not one of them.
Perhaps you mean that's not good enough?
I, too, want to see the oil industry shrink. To my mind, it's downright dangerous to devote such a large part of the global economy to an industry that is literally putting our planet in peril.
The larger conversation we need to have, however, is what a post- growth economy should look like.
Actually, I don't really believe this. I do use/consume a lot of plastic, but I find in practice that in the vast majority of cases, the decision to make those items from plastic is an arbitrary one. The market has made decidision on my behalf, and provided me with a range of plastic options, with very few non-plastic options, for an application that has no hard dependency on plastic.
Electronics would be one of the big ones, and can largely be (and often are) made with aluminium* casings. Fittings have similar metallic alternatives. PCBs are something of an exception here: yes, there are aluminium/metallic substrates, but even those are epoxy-insulated.
Most other plastic uses are similar stories: we're provided with a range of exclusively plastic choices by the market, but that doesn't make it necessary on the production end.
Plastic is usually cheaper, yes, but this is a result of a long chain of subsidies, wars, and other market interference. This doesn't reflect true production cost.
* Worth noting, the environmental impact story for aluminium/other metals isn't too great either, but that's a separate topic.
Can it be fully replaced? Yes, but it will really take quite a bit of effort, or even going back to already phased out tools and materials.
It would take an almost impossible effort (I'm not optimistic) on the part of industry. The only point I was rebutting is that our day-to-day consumer needs could not be met without plastic without significant lifestyle change by private individuals. I don't believe that this is true.
But yes, the change required on an holistic level is pretty much insurmountable.
The U.S. produces 12,000,000 barrels of oil per day. 4,380,000 barrels per year. According to https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/14/u-s-tax-code-4-6-billio..., we also subsidise this production by $4B per year, or about a dollar a barrel.
If you are saying that a $1 per barrel subsidy for oil causes the cost of plastic widgets to shrink appreciably, I think you are very wrong.
If you are saying that the total cost of the Iraq war should be rolled into the cost of plastic widgets, I think you are very wrong.
I am saying that. I'm also saying the cost of the lifecycle of plastic production and recycling/disposal, including environmental cost (which we have plenty of proxies for these days in terms of representing using economic metrics) should be rolled in.
(and yes, the same goes for aluminium: it too has ancillary costs to consider)
It was used everywhere - as filler, as insulation, as fire retardant, and was so cheap it even got used as bulking agent, as fake snow for Xmas and in packaging. We got rid of it in new applications in just a few years once it was realised that the health cost was far in excess of its utility. It costs thousands to rip out some of the old insulation in buildings, especially where it's part of the fabric of the building.
Lead in petrol was far to useful to be replaced, etc etc...
I just think it's part of the new innovation debt coming due. It's only now coming due for plastics and oil and the extreme cost of profligate unconstrained use is starting to be realised.
It comes from thinking of the planet as infinite and able to absorb anything thrown into it, rather than a closed cycle life support system.
I'm no fan of oil either, but let's not get carried away.
A house need not depend on oil - bricks can still be fired and glass made from carbon neutral electricity, pipes can be copper, and drainage use ceramic like was used until the 80s. Similar for transport, water treatment etc. Perhaps a few specialised uses of PVC and other plastics will remain and the rest go - regulated or priced from existence. Now 95% of coal and horses aren't around we still keep stables for fun, some still enjoy horse racing, steam trains run at weekends and museums run a few steam engines.
Thing is the assumption that the planet could take everything thrown at it used to work - now population has grown so much that no longer applies. JulianMorrison has a point that "it's useful" can no longer be enough - stuff isn't only used by a few wealthy types any more, on a planet with under 1bn, whilst most of those engage in agriculture. We have to learn to consider damage control and restriction far sooner than was necessary even in the 1930s.
My worry is the modern dogma to not want to impact business at all costs. Governments avoid strong regulation, requiring consideration of the land a business occupy, the pollution and waste they cause or the people whose needs they should serve. Essentially they became subservient to multinationals. It will make changing that much harder and fought against much more - not least by those oil interests.
Not easy, but not impossible either. There is precedent after all. :)
The final thing I would say is that if those in control are sincere about tackling climate change, an open borders immigration policy is a very strange thing for them to be promoting. Instead of supporting people to live good lives where they are - in low carbon countries - we are encouraging them to move to high carbon countries, and effectively creating a reason to generate massive amounts of carbon through house building, infrastructure etc. This is one of the main reasons I am sceptical about the messages that come down from on high, and even more so given that the stock response to this issue is accusations of racism etc.
Get rid of plastic forks, spoons, knives, and straws... again no big deal.
Get rid of plastic used in food. Milk jugs, processed food, tv dinners, plastic bags of lemons/potatoes/etc. Kill off water bottles (which are a waste anyways), soda packages in plastic, cheap boxed wine, etc.
Sure there's some harder things, like say fertilizer, car interiors, toys, keyboards, mice, watches, network cables, etc. But still we could hugely reduce are use of oil.
Sadly the world was just starting to move away from oil a bit, then USA went from a large oil importer, to a huge exporter and the prices dropped.
Not denying that the oil industry hasn't got any sins.
You can't just snap your fingers, make oil go away and expect modern civilization to keep existing as it currently does.
It took ~150yr to get the oil industry where it is today and that is with a massive financial incentive. People need lubricants, tars, fuels, plastics, everything that oil makes cheaply and well. In the absence of strong organic (not artificial, i.e. regulatory compliance) incentives to stop using oil it will almost certainly take much longer than 150yr to reduce oil usage for energy/fuel to negligible levels. We will likely never stop using oil for plastics, fertilizers and other "critical to modern civilization" things until something that's cheaper and equivalent or better comes along for every last use case.
Keep in mind that whatever we have next will have tradeoffs too.
I don't think it's right to estimate such a long time for oil to become obsolete as a fuel, just because we use it for other things too.
With advances in biotech and possible harnessing of biological nitrogen fixation we might overcome even this...
Depriving employees of their jobs
Depriving customers of their produce
Just because it fits your socialist utopia
"half of demand" is not 4%. Or is it another industry? What am I missing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Oil
In a word, it wasn't a serious attempt. It may have been the most that could be successfully negotiated, but it wasn't a serious attempt at actually solving the problem.
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Effectiveness for why I say this.)
Single use plastics are responsible for big savings in food waste and transport (which is still almost entirely fossil fuel based). They improve people's quality of life for a very small cost in oil. The only significant problem is a small minority of people disposing of them improperly, and the only reason people even care about that is because of emotive reporting showing dead animals (nobody cares about all the animals killed by air pollution and climate change).
The solution isn't banning single use plastics, it's enforcing existing laws against littering. Enforcement can be funded by a tax on the plastics.
As for emotive press stories about dead animals being the only reason people care. Did you know that the average human meal contains microplastics now? That your body contains microplastics right now?
"About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." --IPCC AR4
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-lo...
Plastics are a visible but small part of our environmental damage. Plastic straws doubly so.
EDIT: To be clear I am not saying that it is harmless to release lots of CO2 I am saying that we can't compare pollutants by simply looking at the gross tonnage released.
Typically all you need to do to keep microorganisms from eating something is keep it dry. We tend to do that for laptops anyway.
Besides, the assertion wasn't that plastic would still be useful for everything. It just wouldn't be useless.
https://aem.asm.org/content/77/22/7962
I expect they'll be common well before 10,000 years. It's certainly an easier problem than getting CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Same way than having shorter circuits to reduce transport, or packaging at the end of the chain, or even smarter selling unpackaged good is a much smarter way to deal with transport pollution.
I love this backlash and I'm really happy to try to my small contribution
- ~consigned glass jars - fiber bags
what about people who do neither.
Plastic vs fuel is not an either/or thing: they're both problems. We probably can't eliminate either of them completely, but we should try to cut back on both as much as we can.
A tax on plastic packaging would be a very good idea.
We need to do lots of things, this particular thing is easy to do so we should do it.
I don't buy the argument that because we aren't doing other things that we should not do this too.
You can use the same logic to never do anything at all.
The best thing about these bans is they are very visible and raise awareness, giving you the critical mass you need to solve other issues too.
I think it's more likely to reduce the chance of solving other issues because it uses up people's mental charity budget. Humans are not naturally utilitarian, and good causes compete with each other based on emotion. There's a huge risk of scenarios like this:
>Save the poor orphan puppies!
"Sure, they're cute. Take all the money."
>Repair the historic building!
"Eh, I guess it's important. Here's a small donation."
>Feed the starving children in Africa!
"Didn't we do that already? Not my problem."
>Prevent the death of billions through climate change!
"I'm sick of all these demands. I'm going to start rolling coal just to spite you."
We need to focus on numbers, not emotion, and the numbers don't justify the backlash.
Plastic straws improve quality of life? Give me a break.
Even if you take every plastic and drop it into a bin, you're either going to burn it or dump it. Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it. Until we have a proper process for disposing plastics safely and cleanly, we must reduce using it in the ridiculous way we're using it. Single-use plastic bag should never be used if you have a way to use a reusable cloth bag instead.
Because people in the first world won't stand for modern incineration plants. The NIMBYs who would personally be negatively affected spread FUD about a .00001% increased chance of getting cancer or some crap like that.
Burning trash in general is a damn good way to get rid of it. You're left with ash which takes up a fraction of the space and is much easier to contain than the original trash product. Sure, it emits some nasty stuff but when you run an incinerator in the first world you can scrub that out of the exhaust. When you ship that stuff to the 3rd world you lose oversight of what happens to it.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
We would be way better of funding cleanup efforts in these rivers.
> The solution [is] enforcing existing laws against littering
That's the classic industry argument: it's not their fault if there is pollution, it's the end users that irresponsibly throw stuff away. Ignoring their heavily-funded lobbying to avoid plastic reduction laws and minimize recycling obligations.
Vermont was planning to introduce laws to require reuse of drinks bottles in the 1950s. Coca Cola, Philip Morris, Budweiser and others clubbed together to form and fund "Keep America Beautiful" to advertise and lobby for the problem to be landed on the consumer instead of the businesses that created the problem.
The solution is putting blame back on the producers, where it belongs. Require them to own that externality they created. Oh, and discouraging litter.
I'm having a hard time imagining somebody justifying flying more/further because they aren't using plastic straws in their day-to-day life.
Surely we can work to improve the world on multiple fronts at a time, and if single-use plastics present themselves as both unsustainable long-term and a low-hanging fruit (compared with air travel) in terms of sourcing replacements, then it's reasonable that people would seek to make that small change independent of what is happening in the rest of their lives.
I find this trend of slapping "virtue signalling" on all but the most lofty goals to be a bit disingenuous. It must assume that there is one section of society that is empowered to make all of these changes and that by choosing to pursue single use plastics they suffer the opportunity cost of not developing an alternative means of rapid transport or improved environmental law enforcement.
A single-use-plastic tax which truly takes into consideration the cost of enforcement / cost to the environment and landfill / depletion of a finite resource would have the same effect, sure. I'm not convinced it would escape the "virtue signalling" label, though.
The existence of any public subsidies of fossil fuels is unconscionable.
They should all be diverted to subsidize solar, wind, and geothermal.
I think electric cars centralise the problem of air pollution, which in turn makes solving the problem from a centralized place more efficient and can be improved as technology improves.
It's like when centuries ago, urban places didn't have sewers and just let the excrement flow down the open gutters on the street (we are here with combustion engines). In time, sewers were built, but the untreated sewage would flow in to rivers & oceans (similar to as if electric cars became the norm now). In time, sewage treatment plants were also built (power generation shifts to fossil fuel-free).
Same way as we now look at open sewers in disgust, I'd say down the future we'll probably look at combustion engines in disgust and say "how the heck did people live like that?"
It's the same with kilowatt-hours. I don't care where it came from as long as it's 1) available and 2) within spec.
Exxon knew of climate change in the 70s and hid it.
Electric cars aren’t any better for the environment given all the mining that goes into the batteries right?
There are certainly issues with the mining of rare earth and other minerals required to build all the batteries, but a) they are not, by and large, carbon issues, and b) there are some promising new battery technologies that would use fewer of these resources coming along within the next decade or so.
Don’t make the mistake of seeing it as a binary thing: electric cars are not perfect, all-natural devices that cause no environmental issues from conception to disposal, but they are, on balance, much better than internal-combustion engines, especially for climate change, which is the really big environmental issue most likely to cause problems for human civilization.
Imagine for a moment that coal, oil, gas, metals, rare earth elements, lithium, etc etc were all simply an interchangeable concept of "bad mass". Meaning, we need the mass to do something, but the process of mining/extracting/producing it has bad side affects.
One way of doing things, the bad mass is produced and consumed on a constant basis. The gas in your tank is used exactly once.
The other way of doing things the bad mass is produced and re-used for roughly a decade, after which it can be recycled. The lithium in your EV battery will get used several thousand times in its first life, a few hundred more in a secondary application, and then recycled for who knows how many more uses.
So simply from a "consumed" vs. "re-used" basis the process of mining lithium (and cobalt etc) would have to be thousands and thousands of times worse than the process of drilling/extracting/refining oil just for them to break even.
It is good and important to recognize that simply replacing ICEs with EVs is closer to harm reduction than problem-solving, but it is a very very large harm reduction so statements like "electric cars aren't any better for the environment given all the mining" retard that harm reduction.
It seems like we don't know for sure whether air-to-fuel startups actually have a cost effective way of fixing hydrocarbons from the air or whether they are just trying to lure investor money.
But as a grownup. As a responsible adult. As someone who passed high-school math. You have to look at the challenge we face, and the timeframe we have to address it, and say "oh, time's up."
We don't get to play the "i'm hoping for X" technology game anymore. That phase is over. It's time, now, to shift everything we can as fast as we can using the things we have and know.
Hopefully air-to-fuel r&d gets somewhere in a decade, and hopefully it can be commercialized quickly thereafter. That'd be great. It would go a very long way toward saving the airline and international tourism industries. But w/r/t cars, TIME IS UP.
A basket of technologies is to me a better determinator for progress (or shift, if you prefer).
The main focus in developing countries is foremostly on the human front: basic needs, personal security, health care, etc. It's does not make sense to me to expect the switch to electric cars to make or break general progress. Air-to-fuel alternatives are very attractive as a basket of "energy goods". I can see companies here setting up their own production centres. At the same time the existing infrastructure can benefit (such as large oil pipelines, the existing car and truck fleet, power generators and peak energy production, etc.).
Don't misunderstand, I think electric cars would be a better future (nitrous oxide byproducts, I am looking at you). Air-to-fuel tech is a great supporting basket item.