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It's worth noting that a decent portion of the value/products generated by by the fossil fuels industry isn't gasoline or diesel. Tons of products are made wit

It's worth noting that a decent portion of the value/products generated by by the fossil fuels industry isn't gasoline or diesel. Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process, much of the research done by these companies over the last century was focused on inventing new products and creating markets to sell them to. Replacing transportation use of fossil fuels with renewables doesn't actually replace all of the profits in the fossil fuel industry, and doesn't explain how those products we've now grown to expect will be created if we aren't refining oil for gasoline and diesel.

JohnFen 3y ago
> Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway. If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  Having worked for the upstream research arm of a major US oil company, I can confidently say this is no longer the case regardless of what the industry may have looked like when Esso was still a business. Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars. If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I wasn't claiming that there wouldn't be a large economic upset. There obviously would. I was only claiming that oil refining would remain as an industry. Probably a much smaller industry. But all of that would only be for the good.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway. If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.

flagrant_taco 3y ago
Having worked for the upstream research arm of a major US oil company, I can confidently say this is no longer the case regardless of what the industry may have looked like when Esso was still a business. Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars. If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I wasn't claiming that there wouldn't be a large economic upset. There obviously would. I was only claiming that oil refining would remain as an industry. Probably a much smaller industry. But all of that would only be for the good.