Decided to add climate evangelist to my titles because we need much more than just Greta Thunberg doing this.
We need to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible.
That's the only way to stop climate change.
Anyone saying different is bullshitting you.
This means that we will need to RESTRUCTURE SOCIETY.
BUSINESS AS USUAL IS NOT AN OPTION.
We need to find ways of living that don't damage the environment further, and which allow us to cope with the effects of climate change.
We need much deeper changes than just 'electric cars' and 'clean fuels'.
Following a recent discussion on here, I found an infographic on what we get from crude oil, and there are a huge number of products that we DO get, people normally think of the components of Petrol, diesel.
I made a blog post about this, it is just not published yet.
So what I want to do help from others ( website pages can be linked together) is to look at these products and research
1. Can we live without them ( if we can then adapt and stop using them)
2. Can we develop sustainable alternatives
3. How can we do this ( we need more people to study chemistry for example)
4. We need to invest in 3 so we can do 2
5. What is the product ENTIRE lifecycle
As you said here we need to just stop using polluting products but we also need to change so much about how we live.
Hopefully here on fedi, as we can have rational / civilised / science based discussions we can come up with some real alternative plans.
My blog is here, and the mentioned posts are scheduled for the next few days, if I republish manually they will federate, otherwise I can just post a link here.
https://personaljournal.ca/paulsutton/
I don't want to make this seem like a pro-oil argument, I want to make this so people apply critical thinking in to what we get from oil and what alternatives we can develop and what to do if we can't.
@zleap @mzedp as much as I hate the phrase "let the market decide", this is one of those cases where it actually does make sense. The plastics market is too broad & complex for a top down command & control economy fix. We could grandfather burning hydrocarbons (to allow some time to adapt) & the problem will fix itself.
@zleap @mzedp here's another idea for you though: polymers are made from monomers, monomers such as ethene, styrene, vinyl chloride et al don't *have* to come from oil. You can synthesise them from carbon dioxide & water & a few others using green energy. It's just not thermodynamically favourable or cheap.
So can @greenpeace make this point too, so peole understand oil is not just about CO_2 but stopping oil will also reduce plastic production and pollution too.
@zleap @mzedp a few things I want to say about this topic:
- plastics replaced wood products when they were popularised
For many products we could return to wood, it's just more expensive
- which brings me to my second point: plastics are only so cheap because ethene etc are by-products of oil refining where the main $$$ product is fuel (octane and hydrocarbons with similar properties to octane),
Ban burning fossil fuel hydrocarbons & it fossil fuel plastic becomes economically unfeasible to