Some great soul said something like "God has given everything to meet your need, not your greed". As long as the greed continues to increase exponentially, no amount of innovation is going to support it.
The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on.
Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
This is why I'm somewhat apathetic about the current price increases in tech and oil. We just consume such insane amounts of resources unnecessarily. We throw old tech in the junk drawer because the latest model came out, drive tanks to the supermarket, and buy endless amounts of junk clothing that ends up in landfill.
At least in developed countries I feel like most consumption could stop and daily life wouldn't be any worse off.
A fairly basic economic principle is that demand is infinite. It's a derived concept from the fact that demand is driven by desire- both need and want. The less personal sacrifice required to get something, the more people will want it.
It's far from an axiomatic truth, but it's a good enough approximation to point out that "Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people" is an absurd bogeyman here. If it wasn't, everyone would be living in shoebox apartments, would never travel outside their neighborhood in their mega city, and our diets would consist of the least possible energy intensive foods possible- probably a soylent style powder that is shelf stable and doesn't require a great deal of refrigeration or preserving.
We don't live like that because people don't really see how taking a 5 minute car ride round trip to the grocery store instead of a 40 minute bus ride round trip is worse for the environment, and we keep living in our individual houses because we don't like apartments, and so on and so forth. Properly insulating those buildings requires polymers for things like weather sheathing, plus insulation for electrical cabling, and so forth. All of these little inefficiencies and uses for polymers add up to the simple truth: we're not going to hit CO2 reduction goals on the basis of individual action, and we're not going to stop using plastics.
This is an important comment, thank you. Most people know this half consciously but because it's been so pervasive their entire lives it never really hits. Until people wake up to this fully and snap out of whatever trance they are in, we will continue down this destructive path.
Adding to what you said, there is also a sudden scarcity that is partially real and caused by an oligarchy that took over in different places and caused world level problems and partially a fake scarcity done by extreme demand and intentional smaller production levels.
> Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
That buys into propaganda from businesses who don't want those responsibilities. ESG (and DEI) were widely embraced by businesses; they groups of humans and humans generally have empahy and care.
I vaguely recall reading that biofuels have been debunked as being insanely inefficient as a fuel source and consume land that would be better used to grow food.
40% of US corn goes to biofuel (ethanol), contributing less than 4% of US fuel supply. With soybean oil it's even worse, 40% contributes 1%. Converting all farmland currently used for biofuel production globally to solar would produce 23x as much energy, enough to electrify the entire global (automotive) vehicle fleet.
I'm not familiar with how much feedstock is required to produce bioplastics, but it looks like plastics production globally is, I believe, around 500 million (metric) tons -- ie 500 billion kilograms, vs roughly 120 billion liters of biofuel. Napkin math at 1 kg/L (the density of ethanol is about 0.8 kg/l, so that's close), and that's about 4x more required, assuming no wastage by mass.
In other words, you're right to be skeptical; I don't think the math works.
Methanol and methane produced via DAC has been proposed as an alternative, but will only be feasible economically with extremely low energy costs. Possible with high solar penetration (see Australia), but far from a settled political question.
Biofuels are basically green washing. While sugar-based is better than corn-based, Brazilian biofuel is mostly just turning EU subsidies into profit, by converting petrol into sugar-based biofuel to burn instead of burning the petrol directly. Very unfortunate.
The main focus of the article is not biofuels, but plant based plastics. We can replace most of the need for fuel with EV (or hydrogen fuels), but plastic is a harder problem. Micro and nanoplastics are also a problem that urgently needs to be addressed.
This article tosses together bio fuels and plastics. By conflating the two, they seem to try to create some urgency for subsidizing the creation of both. And of course bio fuels are heavily subsidized already.
This article deliberately confuses things by conflating it with the discussion around bio fuels. Which, as you point out is largely redundant given that we now have decent EVs for literally anything with wheels commercially available. Anything from the tiniest scooters to the largest vehicles operated in the mining industry. And everything in between.
The fallacy with this debate is the focus on disproportionately small parts of the challenge of de-carbonization. If we manage to electrify most road and rail transport, heating (industrial and domestic), some shipping and aviation, etc. that would make an enormous dent in fossil fuel usage. After that we might focus on harder things like plastics. I'm not against people focusing on that now. More power to these people. But put it in perspective: it's relatively small part of the problem. And we have alternatives.
This fallacy is a recurring theme in fossil fuel lobbying materials. By spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, they hope to slow down the accelerating implosion of their primary revenue maker: fuel sales. So, they talk up hydrogen and bio fuels. Sponsor studies on the impact of windmills on wild life. Etc. I can't help but look at this article and wonder who payed for it.
There is nothing to debunk. Countries that heavily rely on biofuels did it to fight trade pressures. Brazil is the posterboy.
We KNOW it is inefficient. It's why anywhere someone who has the capital and has a brain, is swapping out cornfields for solar panels to make more money. Problem is the first setup of a corn field when you don't have that capital is cheaper due to subsidies.
America does those subsidies too. You guys voted for it, of course!
I recently learned that nylon 11 (sometimes aka PA11) is made from castor oil, which (I also learned) is just the vegetable oil extracted from the castor bean.
Interesting overview. I’m curious how these plant-based replacements hold up on durability and moisture resistance long-term vs petroleum plastics, especially for packaging and outdoor use.
The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on.
Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
At least in developed countries I feel like most consumption could stop and daily life wouldn't be any worse off.
It's far from an axiomatic truth, but it's a good enough approximation to point out that "Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people" is an absurd bogeyman here. If it wasn't, everyone would be living in shoebox apartments, would never travel outside their neighborhood in their mega city, and our diets would consist of the least possible energy intensive foods possible- probably a soylent style powder that is shelf stable and doesn't require a great deal of refrigeration or preserving.
We don't live like that because people don't really see how taking a 5 minute car ride round trip to the grocery store instead of a 40 minute bus ride round trip is worse for the environment, and we keep living in our individual houses because we don't like apartments, and so on and so forth. Properly insulating those buildings requires polymers for things like weather sheathing, plus insulation for electrical cabling, and so forth. All of these little inefficiencies and uses for polymers add up to the simple truth: we're not going to hit CO2 reduction goals on the basis of individual action, and we're not going to stop using plastics.
That buys into propaganda from businesses who don't want those responsibilities. ESG (and DEI) were widely embraced by businesses; they groups of humans and humans generally have empahy and care.
Maybe Marx was on to something after all...
I'm not familiar with how much feedstock is required to produce bioplastics, but it looks like plastics production globally is, I believe, around 500 million (metric) tons -- ie 500 billion kilograms, vs roughly 120 billion liters of biofuel. Napkin math at 1 kg/L (the density of ethanol is about 0.8 kg/l, so that's close), and that's about 4x more required, assuming no wastage by mass.
In other words, you're right to be skeptical; I don't think the math works.
Methanol and methane produced via DAC has been proposed as an alternative, but will only be feasible economically with extremely low energy costs. Possible with high solar penetration (see Australia), but far from a settled political question.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
https://ourworldindata.org/biofuel-land-solar-electric-vehic...
This article deliberately confuses things by conflating it with the discussion around bio fuels. Which, as you point out is largely redundant given that we now have decent EVs for literally anything with wheels commercially available. Anything from the tiniest scooters to the largest vehicles operated in the mining industry. And everything in between.
The fallacy with this debate is the focus on disproportionately small parts of the challenge of de-carbonization. If we manage to electrify most road and rail transport, heating (industrial and domestic), some shipping and aviation, etc. that would make an enormous dent in fossil fuel usage. After that we might focus on harder things like plastics. I'm not against people focusing on that now. More power to these people. But put it in perspective: it's relatively small part of the problem. And we have alternatives.
This fallacy is a recurring theme in fossil fuel lobbying materials. By spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, they hope to slow down the accelerating implosion of their primary revenue maker: fuel sales. So, they talk up hydrogen and bio fuels. Sponsor studies on the impact of windmills on wild life. Etc. I can't help but look at this article and wonder who payed for it.
We KNOW it is inefficient. It's why anywhere someone who has the capital and has a brain, is swapping out cornfields for solar panels to make more money. Problem is the first setup of a corn field when you don't have that capital is cheaper due to subsidies.
America does those subsidies too. You guys voted for it, of course!