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I realize the shortages you enumerated have different reasons , but a highly respectable French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici , has been repeating for years tha

by LeBit 20d ago

I realize the shortages you enumerated have different reasons , but a highly respectable French engineer, Jean-Marc Jancovici , has been repeating for years that we are heading into an inevitable age of "degrowth". It is not an "if". It is now inevitable. He is very pro alternative sources of energy but he clearly explains nothing can replace petroleum right now. Petroleum is used to build everything. Gas for your car. Your clothes. Plastic bags. Our beloved computers. Everything uses petroleum one way or another. We are doomed. I’m just happy I’m too old to go through all the bad times that are coming.

deleted 20d ago
[deleted]
icantevenhold 20d ago
You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable. Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it. Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.
- toasty228 19d ago
  > You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything. Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.
  - danaris 19d ago
    > Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Not at this scale and price and convenience. We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
    - toasty228 19d ago
      You might want to read the whole comment, renewables are only cheap now because every single step of their creation involves fossil fuels. Once everyone wants 60kg of lithium in their car and 100kg for they're home we'll quickly run into the exact same raw ressources problems. If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.
  - bawolff 19d ago
    Scale tends to be a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. regardless, i agree, we aren't totally killing fossil fuels anytime soon. on the other hand, we don't need to. A reduction in demand by 75% would be world changing, and looks a lot more plausible than no fossil fuels ever.
  - icantevenhold 19d ago
    Yea our lives are too convenient and too much filled with useless stuff that no one really needs anyway - and like other comments pointed out the goal is not to replace petroleum 100% immediately - any reduction would already go a long way. Seeing that we use about 2/3 of the total for transportation fuel it’s not like we need most of it to build the renewable infrastructure - that’s more like a drop in the bucket. Most petroleum gets used to propel vehicles, to heat buildings, and to produce electricity - and it’s definitely not without alternative there
- eikenberry 19d ago
  Wouldn't the most important thing be the nitrate fertilizers? Do we have anything to replace them?
stinkbeetle 19d ago
> nothing can replace petroleum right now. You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses. It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century. > We are doomed. More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers. A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic. Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".
- anon7725 19d ago
  > Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn. > We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint. I read "Degrowth" by Kohei Saito recently. I found it challenging (in that it challenged a lot of my preconceived notions), but also a fairly positive approach to implementing degrowth. Sadly, at least in the US, I think it is alien to the American mind and only has a hope of being implemented at the local level in sporadic places.
  - 18d ago
belorn 19d ago
2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.
Timon3 19d ago
We should have accepted that our trajectory is not sustainable, and voluntarily replaced and reduced consumption over decades. But growth was more important - "because the others won't stop growing either!", or "because we're only x% of global emissions", or similar arguments. Now we'll be forced to go through all the same, and much more, in just a few years. And I can't imagine that even 5% of those arguing the statements above will recognize their role in all this.

by LeBit 20d ago

deleted 20d ago

[deleted]

icantevenhold 20d ago

You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable. Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it. Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.

toasty228 19d ago
> You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance. Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything. Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.
- danaris 19d ago
  > Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience. Not at this scale and price and convenience. We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)
  - toasty228 19d ago
    You might want to read the whole comment, renewables are only cheap now because every single step of their creation involves fossil fuels. Once everyone wants 60kg of lithium in their car and 100kg for they're home we'll quickly run into the exact same raw ressources problems. If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.
- bawolff 19d ago
  Scale tends to be a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. regardless, i agree, we aren't totally killing fossil fuels anytime soon. on the other hand, we don't need to. A reduction in demand by 75% would be world changing, and looks a lot more plausible than no fossil fuels ever.
- icantevenhold 19d ago
  Yea our lives are too convenient and too much filled with useless stuff that no one really needs anyway - and like other comments pointed out the goal is not to replace petroleum 100% immediately - any reduction would already go a long way. Seeing that we use about 2/3 of the total for transportation fuel it’s not like we need most of it to build the renewable infrastructure - that’s more like a drop in the bucket. Most petroleum gets used to propel vehicles, to heat buildings, and to produce electricity - and it’s definitely not without alternative there
eikenberry 19d ago
Wouldn't the most important thing be the nitrate fertilizers? Do we have anything to replace them?

stinkbeetle 19d ago

> nothing can replace petroleum right now. You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses. It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century. > We are doomed. More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers. A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic. Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".

anon7725 19d ago
> Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth In human history, when there has been a period of protracted degrowth something bad has very much happened - usually civilizational collapse or severe prolonged economic downturn. > We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth I agree on the first two, but I believe that an expectation of the third is foundational to the post-Enlightenment social order. It has waxed and waned, and there have obviously been incredibly dark periods, but we've usually returned to "things will be better in the future" as a setpoint. I read "Degrowth" by Kohei Saito recently. I found it challenging (in that it challenged a lot of my preconceived notions), but also a fairly positive approach to implementing degrowth. Sadly, at least in the US, I think it is alien to the American mind and only has a hope of being implemented at the local level in sporadic places.
- 18d ago

belorn 19d ago

2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.

Timon3 19d ago

We should have accepted that our trajectory is not sustainable, and voluntarily replaced and reduced consumption over decades. But growth was more important - "because the others won't stop growing either!", or "because we're only x% of global emissions", or similar arguments. Now we'll be forced to go through all the same, and much more, in just a few years. And I can't imagine that even 5% of those arguing the statements above will recognize their role in all this.