3 ms·

The point of the exercise is to sunset the industry, not keep it afloat. Phasing out oil as rapidly as possible is considered a victory

nradov 4y ago
The petrochemical industry will not be sunsetted in our lifetimes. That is not a reasonable thing to expect or want. At most we can somewhat reduce the use of fossil fuels for power, heating, and transportation. Use of fossil fuels as chemical feedstocks will increase.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  > The petrochemical industry will not be sunsetted in our lifetimes Not with that attitude it won't! Dramatic change can happen faster than you think! The 3 social examples I use are smoking, fur coats, and social acceptance of LGBT people. Fur coats went from consensus glamorous to shameful in about 10 years. Support for gay rights and marriage flipped like a startup hockey stick graph over about 5 years, and smoking went from everywhere to nowhere in about maybe 15 years. These all happened almost as if by magic after decades of effort and for people working on the causes, the goals achieved still seemed like a lifetime away before they happened. I understand we're talking global infrastructure, but I'm not going to discount the idea of a rapid transition happening. For technology, look at the CRT -> flat screen transition. Now any CRT display is so rare that it will fetch a price immediately. Look at landline -> smartphone. Incandescent -> LED. Look at the disappearance of newspapers. In the sci-fi movies of the 20th century, not even fantastic fantasies of far off futures imagined a world without newspapers and now they are actually notable if you see one; you stop and briefly look as if it's some monarch butterfly fluttering by. All these technological transitions happened in about a decade, from "only speculative people predicting it" to the previous dominant form being considered vintage These changes, both social and technological are frequent and fairly common. I'm not foolish enough to put a date on energy transition but I'm not pessimistic enough to claim it won't happen in this decade. Energy is bigger then everything I listed, no kidding. I'm arguing that train has already started and greenhouse emitting energy will become as rare as a landline, newspaper, fur coat, CRT, incandescent, or after dinner smoker within some number of not so many years. It's okay if you don't feel like it will. If everyone could predict the future, we'd all be billionaires. I acknowledge I might be wrong and my opinion is fairly unique, but this is how I see things. No disrespect to you over our differences
  - nradov 4y ago
    So what? You haven't proposed a viable alternative. None of those examples are relevant.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      There's an extremely large body of literature and multiple fields of study that have voluminously documented this. Books, podcasts, journals, news articles, congressional records, caselaw, websites, documentaries, museums, conferences spanning decades, hundreds of billions in investments, countless hours of lectures, multiple fortune 500 companies, entire university departments... Your personal enrichment isn't my responsibility and I feel as much obligation to defend this body of work as I have to defend Maxwell's equations or the Pythagorean theorem - that's kinda on you at this point. You're free to be a crank and I'm free to decline to engage. I do however, wish you success in your pursuit.
      - nradov 4y ago
        Now you're just making things up. None of that body of literature proposes an economically viable approach for replacing fossil fuels used as chemical feedstock. Hydrocarbon synthesis is technically possible and has been done on a small scale, but no one has ever proposed a realistic plan for doing it the level needed.
        kristopolous 4y ago
        I literally copied and pasted your objection into Google and got thousands of results from places like the world economic forum, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, IEA, and that's just page 1. Your objection is equivalent to saying in 1998, "LCD panels don't currently constitute 75% of the market so it's unfeasible that it will ever occupy that position" or in 2005, "nobody has demonstrated large scale rollout of 3G networks so landlines aren't going away" This style of argument is the same creationists use when they point to something like blood clotting and say "aha, there isn't yet evolutionary evidence for this so therefore Jesus!" And then evolutionary evidence came forth and they gish galloped onward to the next goalpost. So, #1, golf clap for that rhetorical gambit and #2, please excuse me for ending this here.
- 6510 4y ago
  That kind of predictions have historically been hilariously wrong in hindsight but you've also overestimated how much influence we have on events. I have no idea how fast ruining the eco system will improve the odds but we can always have floods, earthquakes, tidal waves, meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, solar flairs, diseases, famine, ice age, industrial accidents, war and an endless variety of collective insanity/mass hysteria. We could see the end of the petrochemical industry in 10 minutes.

nradov 4y ago

The petrochemical industry will not be sunsetted in our lifetimes. That is not a reasonable thing to expect or want. At most we can somewhat reduce the use of fossil fuels for power, heating, and transportation. Use of fossil fuels as chemical feedstocks will increase.

kristopolous 4y ago
> The petrochemical industry will not be sunsetted in our lifetimes Not with that attitude it won't! Dramatic change can happen faster than you think! The 3 social examples I use are smoking, fur coats, and social acceptance of LGBT people. Fur coats went from consensus glamorous to shameful in about 10 years. Support for gay rights and marriage flipped like a startup hockey stick graph over about 5 years, and smoking went from everywhere to nowhere in about maybe 15 years. These all happened almost as if by magic after decades of effort and for people working on the causes, the goals achieved still seemed like a lifetime away before they happened. I understand we're talking global infrastructure, but I'm not going to discount the idea of a rapid transition happening. For technology, look at the CRT -> flat screen transition. Now any CRT display is so rare that it will fetch a price immediately. Look at landline -> smartphone. Incandescent -> LED. Look at the disappearance of newspapers. In the sci-fi movies of the 20th century, not even fantastic fantasies of far off futures imagined a world without newspapers and now they are actually notable if you see one; you stop and briefly look as if it's some monarch butterfly fluttering by. All these technological transitions happened in about a decade, from "only speculative people predicting it" to the previous dominant form being considered vintage These changes, both social and technological are frequent and fairly common. I'm not foolish enough to put a date on energy transition but I'm not pessimistic enough to claim it won't happen in this decade. Energy is bigger then everything I listed, no kidding. I'm arguing that train has already started and greenhouse emitting energy will become as rare as a landline, newspaper, fur coat, CRT, incandescent, or after dinner smoker within some number of not so many years. It's okay if you don't feel like it will. If everyone could predict the future, we'd all be billionaires. I acknowledge I might be wrong and my opinion is fairly unique, but this is how I see things. No disrespect to you over our differences
- nradov 4y ago
  So what? You haven't proposed a viable alternative. None of those examples are relevant.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    There's an extremely large body of literature and multiple fields of study that have voluminously documented this. Books, podcasts, journals, news articles, congressional records, caselaw, websites, documentaries, museums, conferences spanning decades, hundreds of billions in investments, countless hours of lectures, multiple fortune 500 companies, entire university departments... Your personal enrichment isn't my responsibility and I feel as much obligation to defend this body of work as I have to defend Maxwell's equations or the Pythagorean theorem - that's kinda on you at this point. You're free to be a crank and I'm free to decline to engage. I do however, wish you success in your pursuit.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Now you're just making things up. None of that body of literature proposes an economically viable approach for replacing fossil fuels used as chemical feedstock. Hydrocarbon synthesis is technically possible and has been done on a small scale, but no one has ever proposed a realistic plan for doing it the level needed.
      - kristopolous 4y ago
        I literally copied and pasted your objection into Google and got thousands of results from places like the world economic forum, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, IEA, and that's just page 1. Your objection is equivalent to saying in 1998, "LCD panels don't currently constitute 75% of the market so it's unfeasible that it will ever occupy that position" or in 2005, "nobody has demonstrated large scale rollout of 3G networks so landlines aren't going away" This style of argument is the same creationists use when they point to something like blood clotting and say "aha, there isn't yet evolutionary evidence for this so therefore Jesus!" And then evolutionary evidence came forth and they gish galloped onward to the next goalpost. So, #1, golf clap for that rhetorical gambit and #2, please excuse me for ending this here.
6510 4y ago
That kind of predictions have historically been hilariously wrong in hindsight but you've also overestimated how much influence we have on events. I have no idea how fast ruining the eco system will improve the odds but we can always have floods, earthquakes, tidal waves, meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, solar flairs, diseases, famine, ice age, industrial accidents, war and an endless variety of collective insanity/mass hysteria. We could see the end of the petrochemical industry in 10 minutes.