
The Backlash to Plastic Has Oil Companies Worried - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-05/plastic-trash-crackdown-threatens-oil-giants-chemical-lifeline
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bouncycastle
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...

~~~
f055
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.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Electric cars make the problem fungible.

~~~
bouncycastle
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?"

~~~
JulianMorrison
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.

~~~
bouncycastle
I see. Thanks.

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msiyer
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.

~~~
willio58
I can penetrate an orange skin with my finger pretty easily.

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gigatexal
Good. We need more earth ocean friendly ways of bagging our groceries and
keeping six packs of beer together.

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?

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cagenut
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.

~~~
the_gastropod
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.

~~~
cagenut
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.

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appleflaxen
What we need is backlash against oil.

The existence of any public subsidies of fossil fuels is unconscionable.

They should all be diverted to subsidize solar, wind, and geothermal.

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JulianMorrison
Good. The world was okay before there was an oil industry and it will be
better off when it no longer has one.

~~~
cafebabbe
Without fossil fuels, no Haber-Bosch process. No Haber-Bosch process, no
fertilizers. No fertilizers, no food security.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
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.

~~~
dTal
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.

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vardump
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.

~~~
ellius
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.

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cagenut
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.

~~~
perfunctory
"That’s a worst-case scenario, but it shows the potential disruption to the
industry, where plastics already account for half of demand"

"half of demand" is not 4%. Or is it another industry? What am I missing?

~~~
cagenut
half of "petrochemical" demand (vs 'energy') is my guess at how to read that
quote, based on the two paragraphs above it.

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ptah
their worry translates directly into increased bottom line for politicians

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mrob
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.

~~~
gdfasfklshg4
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?

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thomasahle
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.

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mrob
Bacteria evolve fast, and hydrocarbon-metabolizing bacteria are already known,
e.g.:

[https://aem.asm.org/content/77/22/7962](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.

~~~
gdfasfklshg4
How is hoping that whole new species evolve and spread without changing
ecosystems even remotely an easy problem?

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funnybeam
Because those species already exist and we are changing the ecosystem (by
introducing micro-plastics everywhere)?

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gdfasfklshg4
My point is that changing ecosystems will have unforeseen consequences...

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dfeojm-zlib
It was depressing when a plastic bag was found in the Mariana Trench.

~~~
stevenwoo
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...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/ocean-
microplastic/591094/)

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mikorym
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.

~~~
cagenut
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.

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mikorym
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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perfunctory
According to the chart the oil demand related to cars is still forecast to
increase through 2040. Does it mean we are fucked?

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Sharlin
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.

