They can install solar panels or wire or something and not have to be away from their family for months at a time. Also the vast majority of seamen shipping oil are coerced captive workers from impoverished places with confiscated passports and no rights. Employed isn’t really the right word to use.
So overseas shipping rates drop and some of the companies convert their ships to give joy-rides in seas (because cheaper sea travel), while some seamen get to explore avenues like deep sea exploration (which seems to be a really underdeveloped field) and development.
Well, the average deck hand can stay working at the normal ships that are shipping other stuff.
The above average ones can become a deck hand for the newer vehicles for deep sea operations.
Both are probably already paid low enough that corporate can easily pay them while reducing shipping rates at the same time.
But of course, if the extra exploration rate can be afforded, then so can their salaries.
The only thing that matters is whether there will be someone wanting to do so.
In the US, we use a lot of prime farmland to grow corn that we turn into ethanol - 30,000,000 acres. Thirty million acres!
That ethanol is combined with gas (making the gas less efficient, by the way) and powers our cars in the US.
If you look at the number of miles the ethanol powers in the US, and calculate how many acres of solar we'd need to power electric cars to go that number of miles, we'd need to convert less than a quarter of a million of those acres to solar. So let's round up from 214,000 acres to the 250,000 because... inefficiencies, or whatever.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
For that matter, if we wanted to use that ethanol land (JUST the land we're using for ethanol) to power ALL cars in the US, switching everyone over to electric, it would only take about two million acres. Sure, 2,000,000 acres is a lot, but that would still be freeing up TWENTY EIGHT MILLION ACRES of land we're using JUST to grow corn we turn into ethanol.
It does ignore anything like the chaos of forcing everyone to buy a new electric car, setting that infrastructure up - I'm not saying this would be easy, but it is stunning how much land we could stop abusing to grow corn to burn in our cars.
Mandating solar PV in all building codes nationwide, and incentivizing onshoring of all of the processes that go into manufacturing solar PV panels (including using trade protectionism practices such as tariffs AFTER WE ALREADY HAVE PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURING CAPABILITIES IN THE USA) will do wonders for helping average people transition away from fossil fuel Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars to EVs.
Many people who cry foul about EVs and renewables adding too much load to a grid that is too old and just can't handle it forget the main counter to disarm their arguments: colocating generation with utilization.
Having solar PV (and other renewable) generation closest to where that power wants to be used is the best for the grid infrastructure (maybe not the grid investors) because it reduces residential/commercial load while maintaining the needs of the original giga users of the grid: Industry.
There are solutions to SO many of today's problems. We just have politicians that are bought and sold by billionaires and their corporations who won't do the public's bidding. Voting progressive politicians in, and preferably ones who vocally claim they're Democratic Socialist or similar, is the strongest way we push back against Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Tech, and all the other mega industries.
Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.
Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.
Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.
More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields
If this is true then solar dominance would be very efficient for our society in your's and op's description because in this scenario, corn will still always be grown.. however, it would be marginalized to its regions that can only grow corn as you described.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
What if there is another potato famine, (added: another potato destroying mold)? That corn creates food security because it can always be used as food while the ethanol is replaced with petrol.
Corn grown for ethanol is not edible by humans. Also, do you really think growing only 29,750,000 acres of corn instead of 30,000,000 acres is a meaningful difference? Because it's not.
You suggest to grown none of those 30 million that are used for ethanol. That would be 30 million acres less out of 90 million that are used for corn. That's a major chamge.
Corn grown for ethanol would not help in a food shortage, so for the idea of a food shortage, it is.......... not helpful.
We have plenty of land not being used right now that could be used to grow food.
But we don't have a shortage of food. We have food being wasted and thrown away. We have plenty of excess food. This is like being worried about your driveway taking up valuable lawn space. It's...... not.
You can also scour the ground for pennies just in case you run out of money, too. It'll technically bring in more money than you had before.
You could also keep a stash of aluminum cans to turn in for money as well in case you run out of money.
But the amounts of help these things would do is so incredibly minimal that there are much better uses of your time.
Yes. Technically. Growing less than one percent of the land we grow for ethanol corn would mean that extra less than one percent of corn we really don't want to eat JUST IN CASE we needed that last tiny bit.
We could also easily open far more than that in farmland and grow other crops that are more edible first.
But yes, technically, we could grow food we neither want nor need.
You know the Irish wouldn't have starved so bad if the Brits didn't insist they export all food that wasn't potatoes. Let's not use bad policies as an example for why we can't have good policies.
I was just posting nonsense in response to the commenter who didn't read what they were responding to. But yeah, I did mean it in the sense that it is highly artificially selected grass. Most being all, the remainder being none
Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn't sweet corn, and doesn't taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.
And calling opposition to ethanol "oil and gas propaganda" is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.
Or we could get rid of windmills and underfund solar incentives and research, occupy oil producing nations and try to drive this number higher?
It's 2026 people, let's redefine what progress means! 🦅💪🎇
Yes, but you can’t resell it for a profit elsewhere easily. You want us to switch to sky energy, we need a way to make the output portable so someone can make money on it. I really hate capitalism and hope this is the fall at a global level. Though if anyone was watching, China has been making the right moves towards solar and transport. If they stop oppressing their people i’ll move all my soon to be worthless USD to YUAN.
I laughed at that because the original had the whole thing about China and ended with "...move all my soon to be worthless USD to YEN." I didn't think it was a typo, so it was funny, but it looks like dude changed it to be consistent with what he was saying.
But if you want to do anything with it other than heat something up, you need to build a contraption. And, we've only recently become good at building those contraptions.
funnily enough renewable energy is probably gonna be the biggest driver of the economy in the next 10 years or so, considering that a lot of new infrastructure has to be built for it and they will generate a lot of power to drive further manufacturing.
We could reduce shipping needed for these if it became the norm to ship them dry and mix with water in the home. Bonus: they could be shipped in paper rather than plastic, and consumed from reusable glass bottles rather than plastic.
And set up a bottle deposit and return system that only needs to function at a local level. Haha, the solution to one of the big problems I saw with using glass instead of plastics for packaging. Just don't ship it that way, ship it at scale dry in a paper container that collapses to nothing for the return trip, or holds some other good going back.
1000% this. I've been trying to get my household switched over to dry detergents whenever possible. I simply hate the idea of shipping water around, since it is bulky, heavy, and makes up like 70-90% of most household cleaners.
Fwiw this idea does exist. Here's one site that sells it. That site has handwash, general household cleaner, dishwashing powder & tablets, etc., as well as glass bottles to use them in. Also something called "bleach alternative". All designed to be shipped dry.
The vast majority of oil and gas consumption is just burning the shit in a pile
The oil companies want you to think about plastics to make you think all the oil we drill is important, but it's actually only a tiny fraction. It's all propaganda.
Whether or not they are economically feasible with current tech is a different question.
Given that oil-based fuel still exists, there's no reason for anybody to try to actually create a feasible, sustainable, scalable process to do such a thing.
I didn't say it has to be... It's the reality.
In the context of bioplastics the challenge is that the 17.5% of people in high-income countries are currently the only ones with the infrastructure and the disposable income to easily adopt expensive non-petroleum products and produce them as well. As for the other 82.5%, petroleum-based plastics remain the standard because they are significantly cheaper to produce and easier to manage in traditional waste streams. So, unless these replacement comes in cheap and easily producible forms we are far from replacing anything in the near future.
All of these industries have to be looking into alternatives in parallel, if they are even aware.
Why?
I mean, I think it would be good, but why would they have to be looking into alternatives? Why couldn't we phase out fossil fuels for burning purposes, and then whenever that's done start thinking about phasing them out for use in other products?
Plastics are a waste product of converting oil to useful fuels. That's why they're so cheap and used in the most unbelievably wasteful ways. They'll remain inextricably linked. Fuel is expensive, plastics are incredibly cheap. If we ban the use of fossil fuels but still rely on oil based plastics, plastics will become very expensive and we'll still be creating the fuel. We'll just have a growing supply of worthless energy sitting around and decaying in storage.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea as I'm not an expert by any means, but to keep plastics for essential uses like in medicine will likely require a heavily subsidized plastic industry at least. But hey we already subsidize the fossil fuel industry directly and by externalizing the planet destroying effects of their use...
Also, it's unlikely that countries would be manufacturing their own renewable infrastructure. You would still need ships to haul solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries from China to destination ports.
if i remember correctly, 97% of fossil fuels are actually used to generate energy from it, and only around 3% are used as material, i.e. turned into plastic and such.
"We need the fossil fuels to get more fossil fuels to move the fossil fuels just to take the fossil-fuel thing to the fossil fuel store to get more fossil fuels!" -people that sell fossil fuels
This would be incredibly energy inefficient first of all, because a lit of energy gets lost when using induction and that rises really quickly with the distance from the source.
Second of all, that would be really expensive to build.
Third of all, this doesn't solve the real problem of individualized travel. Cars are really inefficient, becuase: 1. Their infrastructure wastes a lot of space. Most people travel alone in their cars, which means, you have all this sourounding machinery you need to transport in addition, which is huge. Cars get into traffic jams, so the city decides to widen the rode. This moves the whole city further appart, which means people need the car more often, which means there are more traffic jams.
2. They are hugely energy inefficient, because (as said before), you need to move the whole car around just to transport one person
3. They are the most dangerous mode of travel and most often endanger bike drivers or pedestrians.
4. They are loud and stink
You could solve most of these problems with proper public transport. These "futuristic" ideas, like inductive roads or Musks Hyperloop are just a way for big companies to direct funding and attention away from public transport.
OK, well there's a lot of engineers and scientists that you'll have to find and explain how wrong they are. I wasn't inventing induction roadways in my head, they're a real thing and showing a lot of success for use cases like the trucking industry and use on highways where cars travel at speed most of the time.
If we could power vehicles on negativity and dismissiveness of electrifying fossil fuel infrastructure until everyone got the exact solution they wanted, we could all drive to the moon and back.
The thing is, we already have the solution though. It's public transport. Railways can also be used to transport cargo. For longer routes you can still use ships.
Your solution is the unrealistic one. Because we would have to invest an insane amount of money into that infrastructure. We could invest a fraction if that into public transport and we would be so much better off.
I don't care how many scientists agree with you. Just think critically for like 10 seconds about this. How would this really improve anything over public transport?
Also there are a lot if scientists agreeing with me, so...
We don't, we decompose. Fossil fuels are basically plants that died and were subsumed millions of years before bacteria and fungi evolved to decompose them.That doesn't happen anymore.
That means fuel will continue to get more expensive as other markets switch to renewable energy sources. That in turn will reduce the number of ships which will make the fuel harder to find, which will reduce the number of products using that fuel, which will eventually result in total elimination of that market.
The big costs comes from building the infrastructure for fossil fuels. So as soon as demand falls, you have a huge part of the bill has been paid already. So you get low fossil fuel prices. You need to keep in mind that most large oil producers are state owned. Therefore those states will try to shut down other suppliers production.
You can see that already with sanctions against Russia and Iran to keep US oil producers going strong.
Its sort of happening hard like that but companies are resilient. According to the news, in the Philippines they are asking people to work from home and reduce energy use. It's a beautiful country but you can see evidence of industry everywhere you go. Candy wrappers and bags on the street, etc etc. In most neighborhoods you see people sweeping like they do in Mexico. But roads, rivers are covered in trash unless they are part of the tourism industry. It much worse in India from what I can tell. So if that is being reduced, hopefully it will just stop happening.
I’ve been in Indonesia and it’s like that. Lots of rubbish everywhere. What is encouraging is that there appears to be a campaign to recycle and clean up. Some places are a fair bit cleaner now but you still see some flagrant rubbish tossers out and about.
markets don't work that way. if you reduce demand (i.e. fewer people consume fossil fuels), and supply stays constant, that means that prices go down, which makes fossil fuels cheaper until people start using them again. eventually it balances out at an equilibrium state. supply and demand
Yes, thats assumed. However we are taking into account that machinery rusts away quickly. If you stop one refinery for example, that's not a smooth change, its an abrupt step. If we stay steady below the usual high, then trying to come back will be expensive. For that reason we'll see the price increase slowly...you need the fuel, so its a seller's market, they need to get paid as if their load was double in case they need to double. At some point it might drop a bit until it becomes a luxury item.
Here's an example where the price is going up became the supply keeps dropping and the demand keeps increasing regardless of the supply situation:
The same would happen to ice cars. People still want to use them if they have them, but the market keeps shrinking.
Renewables... And also reduction. People need to grow up and realize that driving a vanity tank for half a mile to get a gallon of milk is fundamentally unsustainable. Humanity and the planet can no longer afford to support this level of gross privilege, regardless of the "fuel" used.
Look, you’re not thinking about the shareholders. I NEED YOU to think about the shareholders! How will they ever make their billions? You selfish bastard!
Also, the top energy reserves by company in the world are 5 Chinese silicon producers. 17 m² of high-efficiency solar panels (approx. 100-200 kg total) can produce the same amount of electricity in a year as one barrel of oil (135kg), and they will continue producing for 25+ years.
In these times, having solar is immunity from geopolitical extortion that applies to those dependent on feeding dinosaurs into their energy furnaces.
there's already a movement to change over to ammonia for fueling shipping. I don't have a good feel for the benefits and drawbacks but it is out there.
Yes, as far as I'm able to understand it, ammonia is quite promising for certain industrial purposes (and to run the tankers themselves). Engineer the right engine, and it could potentially run on ammonia while acting as a cracker. Temp store excess hydrogen, and use that for the second part of your journey (or sell it for onshore purposes).
Offshore wind and onshore solar excess can be used to produce hydrogen, not coal.
It takes extra steps and introduces inefficiencies, but it is able to store larger amounts of energy than batteries, and can be used in certain industrial processes which do not run on wires and electrons.
In a succesfully electrified world, it is likely that some ammonia and hydrogen is shipped around the world for such use cases. The main alternative is to keep using fossils.
I'm not sure actually. Sailboats might use less energy while moving, but they probably move slower so you need more of them for the same transport volume per year. So you need more ships, which need more steel to be produced. So you have higher emissions during production.
I bet the 12% are direct use (pipe tail), not all the shit that goes into building and maintaining this orchestrated dance, i.e. at lvl 1 the roads, tires, cars, fuel transport etc. and what does into maintaining and operation the infra to keep lvl 1 gking etc.
But accounting (oil, co2...) for end products is surprisingly difficult.
Ya, they dont give a shit about the environment. Hence why we produce all our goods there, as we theoretically self flagellate ourselves for climate change.
China is actually one of the very few countries meeting its commitments so far. They're even a bit ahead of schedule: renewable and nuclear power plants, fleet electrification (cars and trucks, plus advanced railways), planting large forests, etc.
Granted that won't be sufficient, they should do more and faster, and they now see coming issues with the degradation of their soils and their water resources. But during that same time period, western countries rolled back environment policies and came back on their promises, going further and further away from adverting a catastrophe.
When I see a response like this I am reminded of "Americans wanting to be right at the cost of doing what is good." At a certain point you should ask what is the intention behind your words?
Okay, but why start the framing as a problem with China? Last I checked their carbon emissions have flatlined, if we were to shift that manufacturing home it would likely be more carbon intensive due to our own inefficiencies. We could import green infrastructure but we're a failing petro-state so here we are....
The issue is, that renewable energy requires a lot of rare earth metals. This bring a whole bunch of other issues. Politically and ethically. "In a perfect world it would be... " there is no perfect world. Humans never change.
EDIT: This comment is based on outdated information (see the below thread). A growing number of wind turbines are switching from electromagnets to permanent magnets, the latter of which use rare earth minerals. You could still make wind turbines with electromagnets, but that does likely give countries with rare earth minerals a competitive advantage.
Apprently my information is outdated. For a long time, wind turbines used electromagnets (the fact check is from 2016), but it looks like they are starting to use permanent magnets now (which require rare earths). They still don’t need them, and I think a lot of the ones using permanent magnets are from countries which have rare earths, but I will update my initial comment since I don’t want to move the goalposts.
In any case, there is a commenter above that mentioned solar, which according to my link does not need rare earth minerals.
I think the world bank report is a good read, regardless.
40 years ago? There was an article release in ~1910-1912 stating that burning coal was increasing carbon rates in the atmosphere. We've known about this for 100+ years. Theres always sentiment about jobs being lost / unstable energy grid.. companies just trying to exhaust fossil fuels before switching
And the first electric car was built in the 1880s, so I think it's fair to say that had people acted, it wouldn't be as out of reach as the common person thinks.
We lived for millions of years without jobs. We'd be fine. In fact, We'd replace those jobs with jobs in renewable energy sectors.
Its insane to me that people argue that we should continue accelerating climate change which will kill far more people and cost more money than what we would make addressing and mitigation it.
But that would get in the way of your dumbass argument wouldn't it?
That really depends on what you will run all the remaining ships. Current battery technology isn't suitable for large container ships, sails work for smaller ships. There are ideas to use ammonia as fuel for large ships, and it won't be made were it is consumed, countries like Namibia are planning on becoming large suppliers of ammonia. If this comes true you'll get 40% of all ships just carrying ammonia around the world.
I think you missed the point. The idea is that almost half of shipping is getting around fossil fuels, so we can slash shipping emissions by reducing fossil fuel use.
At the outset, let me say renewables are the end goal and the best outcome.
That said there are a number of problems with this approach. This chart doesn't define what 40% it's talking about. Which is actually impossible because metrics in shipping are considered different for different types of ships and trade. I assume this map/post/thing about deadweight tons (DWT), which is the metric you judge liquid and sold bulk goods. For containers it's TEU (twenty foot equivalent units), for offshore vessels it is often but not always bollard pull, for cruise ships its passenger to crew ratio, etc.
Also the original poster may be referring to total tonnage by metric X (dwt, displacement, raw number of ships) or some other unknown metric)
But let's assume this is a good faith argument. In terms of bulk commodities, it is probably true that nearly half the fleet by deadweight is shipping coal, crude, refined products, LNG/LPG. But that is an effect of the size of ships one uses to transport such commodities - they are always very big ships even though there are far more many smaller ships in terms of raw numbers.
And in any case the problem is demand. If people want cheap shit from China and cheap oil from the Gulf, someone is going to ship it. Renewables are the way forward, but if you want to transport a lot of stuff or a lot of people that you cannot transport by rail, planes and ships are the answer. No other source has the energy density of petroleum to ship stuff.
Somewhat ironically, per ton-mile (i.e., how much stuff you can carry per mile), shipping is by FAR the most efficient way in terms of energy consumed. The pollution from ships is horrible, even changing certain weather patterns in the N Pacific, but as long as we have the demand, it will exist.
Mærsk is testing wind and electrical power on their fleet. Won't make the ships 100% self-sufficient, but will hopefully lower the impact of the vessels.
Flettner rotors can cause fuel reductions of 10-20% [source]. Definitely not nothing, but you still need some way to fuel the ship, those rotors don't turn on their own and are AFAIK not used as main propulsion.
They work. However they are a lot slower - by enough that no shipping company can compete using them. I'm not clear on if they scale to the size of modern ships either.
They 100% work - just as well as they did in 1700. The slow speed means nobody will use them exclusively. I'm not sure if they need extra labor as well (assuming modern controls) but that is another potential reason nobody would use them. They couD though.
They did not mean the ships become green energy ship, they meant the ships would no longet be sailing at all because we don't need to ship the coal etc.
Also, brrak the larger ships down into several sailing ships. Infinite small sailing ships would be more green than one large fuel burning ship.
And infinite small sailing ships could all simulatenously dock at our fractal infinitely long shorelines, all unloading their infinitely small cargo at the same instant, simultanously flooding the earth with infinite amounts of oil and zero amounts of oil that we wouldn't notice at all. :)
i mean, i don't deny that making ports bigger and able to handle more ships (with more infrastructure and people working the ports) would help alleviate some of the problems we're seeing, but it's the whole building more lanes on the freeway problem. build a bigger port and it'll fill up with just as bad traffic
Put mathematically, when we cut fossil fuel usage by 10%, it will result in 4% fewer cargo ships. When we reduce fossil fuel usage by 50%, it will result in a 20% reduction in cargo ships
Several countries already refuse to let nuclear ships into their ports. Also considering the state of some ships (look at Russia's shadow fleet for example) I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have them be powered by nuclear reactors.
...and that would drop the amount of marine fuel needed. Compound interest.
which means we need to transport less fuel around, so less ships
And more unemployed seamen’s.
And more unemployed wharf whores.
Doesn’t anyone think about wharf whores!
Seaman certainly do.
I’m trying to pronounce the h’s here like Stewie Griffin.
Who whants a wharf whore with cool whip?
Sounds like a delectable combination.
I prefer my semen unemployed, thank you.
What kind of abomination is this?
i found them in my little brother's sock
I really don’t know.
They can install solar panels or wire or something and not have to be away from their family for months at a time. Also the vast majority of seamen shipping oil are coerced captive workers from impoverished places with confiscated passports and no rights. Employed isn’t really the right word to use.
Employ them as the crew of an interplanetary solar sail expedition. We'll be colonizing the moons of Jupiter in no time!
Just put some money into advanced sailing ship tech and in a decade we’ll have advanced clippers with many more seamen needed.
So overseas shipping rates drop and some of the companies convert their ships to give joy-rides in seas (because cheaper sea travel), while some seamen get to explore avenues like deep sea exploration (which seems to be a really underdeveloped field) and development.
Somehow I’m not seeing your average deck hand transitioning into deep sea exploration.
Well, the average deck hand can stay working at the normal ships that are shipping other stuff.
The above average ones can become a deck hand for the newer vehicles for deep sea operations.
Both are probably already paid low enough that corporate can easily pay them while reducing shipping rates at the same time.
I’m thinking the deep sea exploration pays a bit more than a guy who can hook some cables on a crate.
But wtf do I know…
But of course, if the extra exploration rate can be afforded, then so can their salaries.
The only thing that matters is whether there will be someone wanting to do so.
Guy doing marine fuel enters the chat.
In the US, we use a lot of prime farmland to grow corn that we turn into ethanol - 30,000,000 acres. Thirty million acres!
That ethanol is combined with gas (making the gas less efficient, by the way) and powers our cars in the US.
If you look at the number of miles the ethanol powers in the US, and calculate how many acres of solar we'd need to power electric cars to go that number of miles, we'd need to convert less than a quarter of a million of those acres to solar. So let's round up from 214,000 acres to the 250,000 because... inefficiencies, or whatever.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
For that matter, if we wanted to use that ethanol land (JUST the land we're using for ethanol) to power ALL cars in the US, switching everyone over to electric, it would only take about two million acres. Sure, 2,000,000 acres is a lot, but that would still be freeing up TWENTY EIGHT MILLION ACRES of land we're using JUST to grow corn we turn into ethanol.
It does ignore anything like the chaos of forcing everyone to buy a new electric car, setting that infrastructure up - I'm not saying this would be easy, but it is stunning how much land we could stop abusing to grow corn to burn in our cars.
Mandating solar PV in all building codes nationwide, and incentivizing onshoring of all of the processes that go into manufacturing solar PV panels (including using trade protectionism practices such as tariffs AFTER WE ALREADY HAVE PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURING CAPABILITIES IN THE USA) will do wonders for helping average people transition away from fossil fuel Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars to EVs.
Many people who cry foul about EVs and renewables adding too much load to a grid that is too old and just can't handle it forget the main counter to disarm their arguments: colocating generation with utilization.
Having solar PV (and other renewable) generation closest to where that power wants to be used is the best for the grid infrastructure (maybe not the grid investors) because it reduces residential/commercial load while maintaining the needs of the original giga users of the grid: Industry.
There are solutions to SO many of today's problems. We just have politicians that are bought and sold by billionaires and their corporations who won't do the public's bidding. Voting progressive politicians in, and preferably ones who vocally claim they're Democratic Socialist or similar, is the strongest way we push back against Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Tech, and all the other mega industries.
If what you say is accurate, the other benefit would be that they wouldn't even need prime, fertile real estate.
They'd just need any space with good sun capture.
Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.
Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.
Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.
More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields
If this is true then solar dominance would be very efficient for our society in your's and op's description because in this scenario, corn will still always be grown.. however, it would be marginalized to its regions that can only grow corn as you described.
I think that's what you was coveying.
A lot of diesel is used in agriculture, maybe unnecessary agriculture.
The actual benefit of solar is that it is widespread so that cloudy days are less of an issue. Obviously storing the excess is a major objective too.
Are you just restating the numbers from the Technology Connections video? Or have you verified any of this research yourself?
I do watch Alec, but this came from my own - informal - work.
What if there is another potato famine, (added: another potato destroying mold)? That corn creates food security because it can always be used as food while the ethanol is replaced with petrol.
Corn grown for ethanol is not edible by humans. Also, do you really think growing only 29,750,000 acres of corn instead of 30,000,000 acres is a meaningful difference? Because it's not.
You suggest to grown none of those 30 million that are used for ethanol. That would be 30 million acres less out of 90 million that are used for corn. That's a major chamge.
Corn grown for ethanol would not help in a food shortage, so for the idea of a food shortage, it is.......... not helpful.
We have plenty of land not being used right now that could be used to grow food.
But we don't have a shortage of food. We have food being wasted and thrown away. We have plenty of excess food. This is like being worried about your driveway taking up valuable lawn space. It's...... not.
Others have pointed out that it can be eaten as staple food.
Land doesn't help if there is no food.
A reserve is for out of ordinary situations.
You can also scour the ground for pennies just in case you run out of money, too. It'll technically bring in more money than you had before.
You could also keep a stash of aluminum cans to turn in for money as well in case you run out of money.
But the amounts of help these things would do is so incredibly minimal that there are much better uses of your time.
Yes. Technically. Growing less than one percent of the land we grow for ethanol corn would mean that extra less than one percent of corn we really don't want to eat JUST IN CASE we needed that last tiny bit.
We could also easily open far more than that in farmland and grow other crops that are more edible first.
But yes, technically, we could grow food we neither want nor need.
Are you happy now?
I am sorry but I am not happy.
It was 30%.It could be used otherwise if we used elecrric cars but that wouldn't create food security.
Well, not starving to death is a reasonable cause to do something.
Then there is other surplus food that has to be thrown away, or also be turned into ethanol.
For food it's worth having a surplus. The bad part is that food is turned into ethanol while people starve to death.
You know the Irish wouldn't have starved so bad if the Brits didn't insist they export all food that wasn't potatoes. Let's not use bad policies as an example for why we can't have good policies.
I meant to say that the problem could be another potato destroing mold. The famine could be avoided by switching to ethanol corn.
Not growing that corn would lead to the same result as exporting it.
not actually true. This is oil and gas propaganda.
Most of the corn grown in the US is not edible. Barely 1.5%. Most of it is grown for sugars, oils and other industrial processes.
did you read the whole comment? alexander already stated that
not actually true. This is oil and sugar propaganda.
Most of the corn grown in the US is grass. 100% of it, in fact. Soybeans make up a large percentage of animal feed.
....grass? you mean feed?
or do you mean maise technically being a grass, but having diverged greatly from it's original form via agricultural selection?
if that's the case, when you say most, what's the remainder then?
I was just posting nonsense in response to the commenter who didn't read what they were responding to. But yeah, I did mean it in the sense that it is highly artificially selected grass. Most being all, the remainder being none
ty for the explanation
Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn't sweet corn, and doesn't taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.
And calling opposition to ethanol "oil and gas propaganda" is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.
🤫pssst,
this is one of the reasons fossil isn’t replaced as fast as it could and should be
Or we could get rid of windmills and underfund solar incentives and research, occupy oil producing nations and try to drive this number higher? It's 2026 people, let's redefine what progress means! 🦅💪🎇
THR GODDAMN ENERGY FALLS FROM THE SKY FOR FREE!!!
Yes, but you can’t resell it for a profit elsewhere easily. You want us to switch to sky energy, we need a way to make the output portable so someone can make money on it. I really hate capitalism and hope this is the fall at a global level. Though if anyone was watching, China has been making the right moves towards solar and transport. If they stop oppressing their people i’ll move all my soon to be worthless USD to YUAN.
I laughed.
I thought hmmmm, this may be happening.
I laughed at that because the original had the whole thing about China and ended with "...move all my soon to be worthless USD to YEN." I didn't think it was a typo, so it was funny, but it looks like dude changed it to be consistent with what he was saying.
But if you want to do anything with it other than heat something up, you need to build a contraption. And, we've only recently become good at building those contraptions.
Inb4
Imagine dreaming of allocating resources to better uses. What a crazy idea!
funnily enough renewable energy is probably gonna be the biggest driver of the economy in the next 10 years or so, considering that a lot of new infrastructure has to be built for it and they will generate a lot of power to drive further manufacturing.
We could reduce shipping needed for these if it became the norm to ship them dry and mix with water in the home. Bonus: they could be shipped in paper rather than plastic, and consumed from reusable glass bottles rather than plastic.
And set up a bottle deposit and return system that only needs to function at a local level. Haha, the solution to one of the big problems I saw with using glass instead of plastics for packaging. Just don't ship it that way, ship it at scale dry in a paper container that collapses to nothing for the return trip, or holds some other good going back.
1000% this. I've been trying to get my household switched over to dry detergents whenever possible. I simply hate the idea of shipping water around, since it is bulky, heavy, and makes up like 70-90% of most household cleaners.
I agree, but the problem is how dangerous many of the chemicals are in dry concentrations.
People already mix household bleach with acidic cleaners. Imagine if they had dry sodium hypochlorite sitting around.
Bleach dispensers at the supermarket or pharmacy sound pretty dystopian but maybe shipping the concentrate and mixing at the PoS is safer.
Fwiw this idea does exist. Here's one site that sells it. That site has handwash, general household cleaner, dishwashing powder & tablets, etc., as well as glass bottles to use them in. Also something called "bleach alternative". All designed to be shipped dry.
Thanks! I'll have to see if I can find something similar in my country.
Why?
Just how it sounds I guess. Things must not be going great when you have a need to dispense bleach haha.
Asphalt for pavement and shingles is amaong the most recycled materials on the planet.
Soap and shampoo can be made from animal fat or vegetable oil.
Hydrogen can be made from water. You get oxygen too.
These are not unsolveable problems.
They're not problems that need to be solved. If we cut fossil fuel use by 90%, there's hardly any impact on these uses.
Not how you think. The asphalt is ground up for the mineral content then mixed with new bitumen.
Most of it is. Cheapest way to do it.
By wasting a lot of electricity.
Just curious, how is the majority of hydrogen produced/mined/farmed now?
I kinda always assumed it was electrolysis just because the process is so simple.
Most hydrogen is currently produced from methane, meaning natural gas. It's a huge source of carbon dioxide.
The vast majority of oil and gas consumption is just burning the shit in a pile
The oil companies want you to think about plastics to make you think all the oil we drill is important, but it's actually only a tiny fraction. It's all propaganda.
Those all can be produced from synthetic hydrocarbons made from atmospherically captured CO2. We don't need to drill an oil well to make plastic.
Whoa, seriously? Okay that's awesome to know. And pretty cool.
-- Frost
I mean, yeah, lots of things are possible.
Whether or not they are economically feasible with current tech is a different question.
Given that oil-based fuel still exists, there's no reason for anybody to try to actually create a feasible, sustainable, scalable process to do such a thing.
You forgot normal plastics. 99.99% of all plastic types are basically made from petroleum.
but then we'd have to ACTUALLY recycle our tin and aluminium cans. I would RATHER DIE
They don't have to be though. We do not need petroleum to make plastics.
I didn't say it has to be... It's the reality. In the context of bioplastics the challenge is that the 17.5% of people in high-income countries are currently the only ones with the infrastructure and the disposable income to easily adopt expensive non-petroleum products and produce them as well. As for the other 82.5%, petroleum-based plastics remain the standard because they are significantly cheaper to produce and easier to manage in traditional waste streams. So, unless these replacement comes in cheap and easily producible forms we are far from replacing anything in the near future.
Why?
I mean, I think it would be good, but why would they have to be looking into alternatives? Why couldn't we phase out fossil fuels for burning purposes, and then whenever that's done start thinking about phasing them out for use in other products?
Plastics are a waste product of converting oil to useful fuels. That's why they're so cheap and used in the most unbelievably wasteful ways. They'll remain inextricably linked. Fuel is expensive, plastics are incredibly cheap. If we ban the use of fossil fuels but still rely on oil based plastics, plastics will become very expensive and we'll still be creating the fuel. We'll just have a growing supply of worthless energy sitting around and decaying in storage.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea as I'm not an expert by any means, but to keep plastics for essential uses like in medicine will likely require a heavily subsidized plastic industry at least. But hey we already subsidize the fossil fuel industry directly and by externalizing the planet destroying effects of their use...
Which will mean people will switch to cheaper alternatives whenever possible.
not to mention the big one, fertilizers
Also, it's unlikely that countries would be manufacturing their own renewable infrastructure. You would still need ships to haul solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries from China to destination ports.
Petrochemicals are barely 10% of oil usage, not really important by volume.
It was literally the byproduct of fuel production. They had to find uses for it and created the petrochemical revolution.
The issue was we already had ways of making all our products without petroleum byproducts. They also didn't cause cancer which is kind of nice.
if i remember correctly, 97% of fossil fuels are actually used to generate energy from it, and only around 3% are used as material, i.e. turned into plastic and such.
"We need the fossil fuels to get more fossil fuels to move the fossil fuels just to take the fossil-fuel thing to the fossil fuel store to get more fossil fuels!" -people that sell fossil fuels
It's the rocket ship problem.
You need fuel to move the fuel that moves the fuel that moves the rocket
Sure, but when a lot of the things don't need to carry the fuel with them and induction roadways do it all in the moment?
Do you mean railways?
No.
Here, let me DDG two words for you: https://www.enrx.com/en/Induction-Applications/Inductive-charging-and-power-applications/Dynamic-electric-roadway
This would be incredibly energy inefficient first of all, because a lit of energy gets lost when using induction and that rises really quickly with the distance from the source.
Second of all, that would be really expensive to build.
Third of all, this doesn't solve the real problem of individualized travel. Cars are really inefficient, becuase: 1. Their infrastructure wastes a lot of space. Most people travel alone in their cars, which means, you have all this sourounding machinery you need to transport in addition, which is huge. Cars get into traffic jams, so the city decides to widen the rode. This moves the whole city further appart, which means people need the car more often, which means there are more traffic jams. 2. They are hugely energy inefficient, because (as said before), you need to move the whole car around just to transport one person 3. They are the most dangerous mode of travel and most often endanger bike drivers or pedestrians. 4. They are loud and stink
You could solve most of these problems with proper public transport. These "futuristic" ideas, like inductive roads or Musks Hyperloop are just a way for big companies to direct funding and attention away from public transport.
OK, well there's a lot of engineers and scientists that you'll have to find and explain how wrong they are. I wasn't inventing induction roadways in my head, they're a real thing and showing a lot of success for use cases like the trucking industry and use on highways where cars travel at speed most of the time.
If we could power vehicles on negativity and dismissiveness of electrifying fossil fuel infrastructure until everyone got the exact solution they wanted, we could all drive to the moon and back.
https://insideevs.com/news/777157/wireless-charging-highway-power/
https://www.prima.ca/en/project/inductive-electric-charging-road/
https://www.enrx.com/en/Company/Media/News/ASPIRE-Electric-Roadway-test-track---Electrifying-the-future-of-transportation
https://en.newsroom.vinci-concessions.com/news/world-s-first-dynamic-induction-charging-highway-road-tests-in-real-traffic-conditions-are-very-promising-c0075-55ff8.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWW0wMahXfA
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666691X22000458
https://newatlas.com/automotive/electreon-vinci-wireless-charging-motorway/
The thing is, we already have the solution though. It's public transport. Railways can also be used to transport cargo. For longer routes you can still use ships.
Your solution is the unrealistic one. Because we would have to invest an insane amount of money into that infrastructure. We could invest a fraction if that into public transport and we would be so much better off.
I don't care how many scientists agree with you. Just think critically for like 10 seconds about this. How would this really improve anything over public transport?
Also there are a lot if scientists agreeing with me, so...
And one day we even become fossil fuel...
We don't, we decompose. Fossil fuels are basically plants that died and were subsumed millions of years before bacteria and fungi evolved to decompose them.That doesn't happen anymore.
... it's people!!
That means fuel will continue to get more expensive as other markets switch to renewable energy sources. That in turn will reduce the number of ships which will make the fuel harder to find, which will reduce the number of products using that fuel, which will eventually result in total elimination of that market.
Unless it's officially propped up by governments at the behest of rich and powerful fossil fuel lobbies!
It's inevitable that it will end some day, but not nearly as fast as it otherwise organically would.
The big costs comes from building the infrastructure for fossil fuels. So as soon as demand falls, you have a huge part of the bill has been paid already. So you get low fossil fuel prices. You need to keep in mind that most large oil producers are state owned. Therefore those states will try to shut down other suppliers production.
You can see that already with sanctions against Russia and Iran to keep US oil producers going strong.
That’s the dream.
Its sort of happening hard like that but companies are resilient. According to the news, in the Philippines they are asking people to work from home and reduce energy use. It's a beautiful country but you can see evidence of industry everywhere you go. Candy wrappers and bags on the street, etc etc. In most neighborhoods you see people sweeping like they do in Mexico. But roads, rivers are covered in trash unless they are part of the tourism industry. It much worse in India from what I can tell. So if that is being reduced, hopefully it will just stop happening.
I’ve been in Indonesia and it’s like that. Lots of rubbish everywhere. What is encouraging is that there appears to be a campaign to recycle and clean up. Some places are a fair bit cleaner now but you still see some flagrant rubbish tossers out and about.
markets don't work that way. if you reduce demand (i.e. fewer people consume fossil fuels), and supply stays constant, that means that prices go down, which makes fossil fuels cheaper until people start using them again. eventually it balances out at an equilibrium state. supply and demand
Yes, thats assumed. However we are taking into account that machinery rusts away quickly. If you stop one refinery for example, that's not a smooth change, its an abrupt step. If we stay steady below the usual high, then trying to come back will be expensive. For that reason we'll see the price increase slowly...you need the fuel, so its a seller's market, they need to get paid as if their load was double in case they need to double. At some point it might drop a bit until it becomes a luxury item.
Here's an example where the price is going up became the supply keeps dropping and the demand keeps increasing regardless of the supply situation:
The same would happen to ice cars. People still want to use them if they have them, but the market keeps shrinking.
40 % of ships should probably be decomissioned anyway.
Imagine not having to rely on countries to pump up oil and polluting the earth by burning it.
We have the technology, but for some reason we want to rely on some other party and pay tons of money.
article
Burn oil to pump oil
Burn oil to refine oil
Burn oil to ship oil
So we can burn oil at home.
cook oil to make plastic/chemicals
dump plastic/chemicals in the ocean
I read recently that they found bacteria in the ocean that's actually metabolizing some (PET) plastics, so that's kind of interesting. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251104013023.htm
Renewables... And also reduction. People need to grow up and realize that driving a vanity tank for half a mile to get a gallon of milk is fundamentally unsustainable. Humanity and the planet can no longer afford to support this level of gross privilege, regardless of the "fuel" used.
Electric busses, and trains need to be part of the solution.
And walking. Cities shouldn't be as spread out as they currently are, especially in the US.
Look, you’re not thinking about the shareholders. I NEED YOU to think about the shareholders! How will they ever make their billions? You selfish bastard!
/s just in case.
Please always provide a source.
The actual statistic is from here I think.
Looks like a screenshot of www.marinetraffic.com - red ships are tankers.
Also, the top energy reserves by company in the world are 5 Chinese silicon producers. 17 m² of high-efficiency solar panels (approx. 100-200 kg total) can produce the same amount of electricity in a year as one barrel of oil (135kg), and they will continue producing for 25+ years.
In these times, having solar is immunity from geopolitical extortion that applies to those dependent on feeding dinosaurs into their energy furnaces.
Not to mention all the fossil fuel used to build the ships in the first place.
There's a lot of fossil fuel burned before that steel arrives at the shipyard.
And if you could build and maintain renewable infrastructure without fossil fuels while generating an order of magnitude energy excess that'd be nice.
Also, there would be less wars in the Middle East.
Do you have a source?
Some ships would carry ammonia, hydrogen, etc.
Still better than the status quo.
there's already a movement to change over to ammonia for fueling shipping. I don't have a good feel for the benefits and drawbacks but it is out there.
https://news.mit.edu/2025/unlocking-ammonia-fuel-source-heavy-industry-amogy-1125
Yes, as far as I'm able to understand it, ammonia is quite promising for certain industrial purposes (and to run the tankers themselves). Engineer the right engine, and it could potentially run on ammonia while acting as a cracker. Temp store excess hydrogen, and use that for the second part of your journey (or sell it for onshore purposes).
sounds awfully good. almost too good.
ugh
Hydrogen is coal with extra steps. It takes a lot of energy to make hydrogen
Offshore wind and onshore solar excess can be used to produce hydrogen, not coal.
It takes extra steps and introduces inefficiencies, but it is able to store larger amounts of energy than batteries, and can be used in certain industrial processes which do not run on wires and electrons.
In a succesfully electrified world, it is likely that some ammonia and hydrogen is shipped around the world for such use cases. The main alternative is to keep using fossils.
Also, those ships themselves cant run on batteries. So some fossil or liquid fuels would still be needed in some applications.
now imagine how much we could save if we used sailboats
I'm not sure actually. Sailboats might use less energy while moving, but they probably move slower so you need more of them for the same transport volume per year. So you need more ships, which need more steel to be produced. So you have higher emissions during production.
and more refrigerant for any perishables on the ships
I wonder how much of that oil is just used to send planes flying.
in the US i found figures ranging from 6 to 12% the largest sector by usage is road traffic using ~45% of the oil in us
here's a chart for EU
I bet the 12% are direct use (pipe tail), not all the shit that goes into building and maintaining this orchestrated dance, i.e. at lvl 1 the roads, tires, cars, fuel transport etc. and what does into maintaining and operation the infra to keep lvl 1 gking etc. But accounting (oil, co2...) for end products is surprisingly difficult.
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing!
Not to mention that would drastically reduce dirty ocean water and countries can begin to clean up their coastlines.
China burns coal to produce them, so there's no shipping since they have coal.
Wake me when China invades a country because they have coal.
Ya, they dont give a shit about the environment. Hence why we produce all our goods there, as we theoretically self flagellate ourselves for climate change.
China is actually one of the very few countries meeting its commitments so far. They're even a bit ahead of schedule: renewable and nuclear power plants, fleet electrification (cars and trucks, plus advanced railways), planting large forests, etc.
Granted that won't be sufficient, they should do more and faster, and they now see coming issues with the degradation of their soils and their water resources. But during that same time period, western countries rolled back environment policies and came back on their promises, going further and further away from adverting a catastrophe.
When I see a response like this I am reminded of "Americans wanting to be right at the cost of doing what is good." At a certain point you should ask what is the intention behind your words?
A righteous thing isnt to run on climate change issues with no plan to affect things because you don't want to touch imports.
Okay, but why start the framing as a problem with China? Last I checked their carbon emissions have flatlined, if we were to shift that manufacturing home it would likely be more carbon intensive due to our own inefficiencies. We could import green infrastructure but we're a failing petro-state so here we are....
At this point I'm starting to believe that we could replace all engines with hamster wheels with actual hamsters and it would be more efficient.
Source for the statistic
Link to article?
Internal Combustion Engine age.
Some of it is metallurgical coal..but yeah, big drop will happen eventually
Yeah but that means shipping company profits get cut almost in half and we can't let that happen now can we?
Less, now that we shut down the Straight of Hormuz
The issue is, that renewable energy requires a lot of rare earth metals. This bring a whole bunch of other issues. Politically and ethically. "In a perfect world it would be... " there is no perfect world. Humans never change.
Modern solar cells and proven storage solutions like sodium ion do not contain these rare elements. Next!
Not wind with sodium ion batteries. EDIT: Source
EDIT: This comment is based on outdated information (see the below thread). A growing number of wind turbines are switching from electromagnets to permanent magnets, the latter of which use rare earth minerals. You could still make wind turbines with electromagnets, but that does likely give countries with rare earth minerals a competitive advantage.
What is the generator made of?
Batteries aren't an energy source but a storage.
Here is a more direct link.
Apprently my information is outdated. For a long time, wind turbines used electromagnets (the fact check is from 2016), but it looks like they are starting to use permanent magnets now (which require rare earths). They still don’t need them, and I think a lot of the ones using permanent magnets are from countries which have rare earths, but I will update my initial comment since I don’t want to move the goalposts.
In any case, there is a commenter above that mentioned solar, which according to my link does not need rare earth minerals.
I think the world bank report is a good read, regardless.
What if you use a pully and have the generator on the ground?
not just that but that's millions of jobs worldwide lost.
had we started moving to renewables 40 years ago, like we should have, the impact wouldn't be as bad now.
40 years ago? There was an article release in ~1910-1912 stating that burning coal was increasing carbon rates in the atmosphere. We've known about this for 100+ years. Theres always sentiment about jobs being lost / unstable energy grid.. companies just trying to exhaust fossil fuels before switching
hate to break the news to you...but renewable energy wasn't viable in 1910-1912.
And the first electric car was built in the 1880s, so I think it's fair to say that had people acted, it wouldn't be as out of reach as the common person thinks.
Oh no...think of the economy! We have to keep accelerating climate echange!
let's assume worldwide shipping creates enough jobs for 1% of the world's population. that's 70,000,000 jobs.
if half of those jobs (35,000,000) just poofed out overnight, what would be the global climate impacts after 6-8 months?
I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be positive.
edit: sorry, didn't realize I was on a slrpnk instance where emotions outrank logic.
We lived for millions of years without jobs. We'd be fine. In fact, We'd replace those jobs with jobs in renewable energy sectors.
Its insane to me that people argue that we should continue accelerating climate change which will kill far more people and cost more money than what we would make addressing and mitigation it.
But that would get in the way of your dumbass argument wouldn't it?
Eh. Compare the investments and outcomes of New York Sun Solar Program and Pennsylvania Shell Ethane Cracker Plant.
In a vacuum, sure. Not when you look at the whole picture
That really depends on what you will run all the remaining ships. Current battery technology isn't suitable for large container ships, sails work for smaller ships. There are ideas to use ammonia as fuel for large ships, and it won't be made were it is consumed, countries like Namibia are planning on becoming large suppliers of ammonia. If this comes true you'll get 40% of all ships just carrying ammonia around the world.
I think you missed the point. The idea is that almost half of shipping is getting around fossil fuels, so we can slash shipping emissions by reducing fossil fuel use.
Ok sorry I will be that guy.
At the outset, let me say renewables are the end goal and the best outcome.
That said there are a number of problems with this approach. This chart doesn't define what 40% it's talking about. Which is actually impossible because metrics in shipping are considered different for different types of ships and trade. I assume this map/post/thing about deadweight tons (DWT), which is the metric you judge liquid and sold bulk goods. For containers it's TEU (twenty foot equivalent units), for offshore vessels it is often but not always bollard pull, for cruise ships its passenger to crew ratio, etc.
Also the original poster may be referring to total tonnage by metric X (dwt, displacement, raw number of ships) or some other unknown metric)
But let's assume this is a good faith argument. In terms of bulk commodities, it is probably true that nearly half the fleet by deadweight is shipping coal, crude, refined products, LNG/LPG. But that is an effect of the size of ships one uses to transport such commodities - they are always very big ships even though there are far more many smaller ships in terms of raw numbers.
And in any case the problem is demand. If people want cheap shit from China and cheap oil from the Gulf, someone is going to ship it. Renewables are the way forward, but if you want to transport a lot of stuff or a lot of people that you cannot transport by rail, planes and ships are the answer. No other source has the energy density of petroleum to ship stuff.
Somewhat ironically, per ton-mile (i.e., how much stuff you can carry per mile), shipping is by FAR the most efficient way in terms of energy consumed. The pollution from ships is horrible, even changing certain weather patterns in the N Pacific, but as long as we have the demand, it will exist.
Mærsk is testing wind and electrical power on their fleet. Won't make the ships 100% self-sufficient, but will hopefully lower the impact of the vessels.
Flettner rotors can cause fuel reductions of 10-20% [source]. Definitely not nothing, but you still need some way to fuel the ship, those rotors don't turn on their own and are AFAIK not used as main propulsion.
I've heard of these things called "sails". Maybe they could look into those.
They work. However they are a lot slower - by enough that no shipping company can compete using them. I'm not clear on if they scale to the size of modern ships either.
Pretty sure they don't, at least not as a total replacement. Reducing fuel usage is still a possibility maybe.
They 100% work - just as well as they did in 1700. The slow speed means nobody will use them exclusively. I'm not sure if they need extra labor as well (assuming modern controls) but that is another potential reason nobody would use them. They couD though.
those are sails, they're just weird
Old sail ships could get stuck for days without wind.
They did not mean the ships become green energy ship, they meant the ships would no longet be sailing at all because we don't need to ship the coal etc.
Also, brrak the larger ships down into several sailing ships. Infinite small sailing ships would be more green than one large fuel burning ship.
And infinite small sailing ships could all simulatenously dock at our fractal infinitely long shorelines, all unloading their infinitely small cargo at the same instant, simultanously flooding the earth with infinite amounts of oil and zero amounts of oil that we wouldn't notice at all. :)
i mean, i don't deny that making ports bigger and able to handle more ships (with more infrastructure and people working the ports) would help alleviate some of the problems we're seeing, but it's the whole building more lanes on the freeway problem. build a bigger port and it'll fill up with just as bad traffic
Put mathematically, when we cut fossil fuel usage by 10%, it will result in 4% fewer cargo ships. When we reduce fossil fuel usage by 50%, it will result in a 20% reduction in cargo ships
nuclear
Several countries already refuse to let nuclear ships into their ports. Also considering the state of some ships (look at Russia's shadow fleet for example) I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have them be powered by nuclear reactors.