Four billion people are fed by fossil fuels
Society has been built upon a house of cards. When a basic requirement of life (i.e. food) is dependent on a non-renewable resource, we set ourselves up for an inevitable breakdown unless we change course.
I hope this pushes the world towards alternative fuel sources
It’s not the Strait of Hormuz crisis, it’s Trump’s Epstein war
Yeah, I hate the word “crisis” here.
Yeah wow isn’t it crazy how the terminology just drifts… news outlets feel an obligation to be objective but in the face of pure stupid evil, that neutrality makes them an enabler.
Hopefully a push further into renewable energy will be a silver lining to come from all this.
In a way it already has been. China has invested so heavily into solar for two reasons: one was the crippling air pollution they were suffering but the other is that they rely almost entirely on foreign oil, and the Strait has long been a strategic weakness for them.
Their huge push into solar has driven down prices and improved efficiency for panels around the world, helping renewables actually become cheaper than coal, and a larger share of our energy generation than coal.
So to quote AI “you’re absolutely right!” And I think just the risk of what we’re now seeing has already driven this.
True, there are other compelling reasons some countries have leaned heavily into renewables. China, like you say. Also Spain and a few other European countries. Probably other ones around the world too.
I just wish that movement had more momentum to it. A massive factor in why it hasn’t taken hold more is because of lobbyists, corporate power, fear of change, and general inertia. Hopefully this situation with Iran is a fucking huge wakeup call to many with influence on this topic. Though I’m not going to hold my breath on that.
I think people don’t know just how successful renewables are. Taken together, they are now the single largest global source of energy, having displaced coal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2rz08en2po
Of course, we want to see even more momentum, because while renewables have surged, so has energy demand, so fossil fuel consumption isn’t quite falling yet.
But I think you may have more reason for optimism than your comment suggests. Conservative lobbyists are not succeeding in killing renewables, except perhaps in shithole countries like Texas.
They’ll still use it to make tons of plastic though.
And animal cruelty will be totally unaffected.
All I’m saying is fuel/power is not the only thing it’s used for and if oil companies start losing money in one area they’ll ramp up another.
Power generation is predominantly coal and natural gas. Liquid petroleum, the base material for plastics, is used very little for electrical generation.
So do you want to explain again how using more renewables instead of coal and natural gas is going to drive up plastic production? I think your point is just reflexively pessimistic.
Exactly, you cannot really affect a distributed source of energy the same way as oil.
You’re not thinking like a bully with a $900 billion / year military!
When oil is 200/barrel industry will switch out of simple necessity.
When it’s that high for years their hand may be forced. It’s a very slow ship to try to turn around.
The switch won’t be instant though. There will be a lot more suffering from this kind of unplanned shift than there would have been from the kind of planned one environmentalists have been advocating for
We’re way past a smooth transition. War is never something that should be cheered on, but if this if the kick in the pants humanity needs to break free from oil, that would be quite the silver lining
We essentally eat fossil fuels (fertilizer, mechanized tilling and harvesting, transformation, packaging, transportation), right? That’s how bad this is. But green/regenerative/low-processing/local can mitigate the risk of these disruptions.
With how the title is phrased, I’m tickled by the implication that we should eat sunlight and air instead.
We essentially already do, there are just a whole bunch of steps in between
We don’t have to use as much. Manure still works its more work though and farmers love to optimize.
But for manure you need the animals in first place, which we should also be trying to reduce, unless you mean goats 🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐
Yeah between fossil fuels, plastics, and petroleum based fertilizers, sometimes it seems like our entire world is made of oil.
Poor people. How about we give them some potatoes instead?
This sounds like exaggeration or media hype to me, just because the cheapest producer of the material has been knocked out doesn’t mean the capacity for other countries to make more isn’t there
Markets are elastic, that’s part of how capitalism works, we compete against each other to sell a product and if the cheapest producer of goods in the market is out and prices go up then that gives others an incentive to come in and compete
In particular it would be good to see green ammonia expanded and higher prices may be just the incentive needed to push it along
I also highly doubt there will be any major famines out of this
Factories aren’t built overnight. Chemical processing equipment needs to be designed, ordered, built, and shipped. Capitalists need to be assured their return on capital, and this is still viewed as a temporary setback. Why spend a few billion to build a factory that might not be needed by the time it’s finished?
Production capacity of 1/4 of the world’s fertilizer is not something we just keep turned off. I expect there will be a lot of extra shifts but the price, make no mistake, will be significantly higher. Farmers won’t plant certain crops, market prices will go up, and some people will go hungry.
