The Backlash to Plastic Has Oil Companies Worried
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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?"
It's the same with kilowatt-hours. I don't care where it came from as long as it's 1) available and 2) within spec.
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?
There are certainly issues with the mining of rare earth and other minerals required to build all the batteries, but a) they are not, by and large, carbon issues, and b) there are some promising new battery technologies that would use fewer of these resources coming along within the next decade or so.
Don’t make the mistake of seeing it as a binary thing: electric cars are not perfect, all-natural devices that cause no environmental issues from conception to disposal, but they are, on balance, much better than internal-combustion engines, especially for climate change, which is the really big environmental issue most likely to cause problems for human civilization.
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 existence of any public subsidies of fossil fuels is unconscionable.
They should all be diverted to subsidize solar, wind, and geothermal.
Reading the article, the projection is that this could "cut petrochemical demand growth to one-third of its historical pace, to about 1.5% a year".
That's good enough. I don't want to see reduced growth rate. I want to see shrinkage.
Actually, I don't really believe this. I do use/consume a lot of plastic, but I find in practice that in the vast majority of cases, the decision to make those items from plastic is an arbitrary one. The market has made decidision on my behalf, and provided me with a range of plastic options, with very few non-plastic options, for an application that has no hard dependency on plastic.
Electronics would be one of the big ones, and can largely be (and often are) made with aluminium* casings. Fittings have similar metallic alternatives. PCBs are something of an exception here: yes, there are aluminium/metallic substrates, but even those are epoxy-insulated.
Most other plastic uses are similar stories: we're provided with a range of exclusively plastic choices by the market, but that doesn't make it necessary on the production end.
Plastic is usually cheaper, yes, but this is a result of a long chain of subsidies, wars, and other market interference. This doesn't reflect true production cost.
* Worth noting, the environmental impact story for aluminium/other metals isn't too great either, but that's a separate topic.
The U.S. produces 12,000,000 barrels of oil per day. 4,380,000 barrels per year. According to https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/14/u-s-tax-code-4-6-billio..., we also subsidise this production by $4B per year, or about a dollar a barrel.
If you are saying that a $1 per barrel subsidy for oil causes the cost of plastic widgets to shrink appreciably, I think you are very wrong.
If you are saying that the total cost of the Iraq war should be rolled into the cost of plastic widgets, I think you are very wrong.
I am saying that. I'm also saying the cost of the lifecycle of plastic production and recycling/disposal, including environmental cost (which we have plenty of proxies for these days in terms of representing using economic metrics) should be rolled in.
(and yes, the same goes for aluminium: it too has ancillary costs to consider)
Can it be fully replaced? Yes, but it will really take quite a bit of effort, or even going back to already phased out tools and materials.
It would take an almost impossible effort (I'm not optimistic) on the part of industry. The only point I was rebutting is that our day-to-day consumer needs could not be met without plastic without significant lifestyle change by private individuals. I don't believe that this is true.
But yes, the change required on an holistic level is pretty much insurmountable.
Perhaps you mean that's not good enough?
I, too, want to see the oil industry shrink. To my mind, it's downright dangerous to devote such a large part of the global economy to an industry that is literally putting our planet in peril.
The larger conversation we need to have, however, is what a post- growth economy should look like.
As in, there might be a lot of downsides to reducing or getting rid of plastic use, but the fall of oil giants is not one of them.
Not denying that the oil industry hasn't got any sins.
It was used everywhere - as filler, as insulation, as fire retardant, and was so cheap it even got used as bulking agent, as fake snow for Xmas and in packaging. We got rid of it in new applications in just a few years once it was realised that the health cost was far in excess of its utility. It costs thousands to rip out some of the old insulation in buildings, especially where it's part of the fabric of the building.
Lead in petrol was far to useful to be replaced, etc etc...
I just think it's part of the new innovation debt coming due. It's only now coming due for plastics and oil and the extreme cost of profligate unconstrained use is starting to be realised.
It comes from thinking of the planet as infinite and able to absorb anything thrown into it, rather than a closed cycle life support system.
I'm no fan of oil either, but let's not get carried away.
A house need not depend on oil - bricks can still be fired and glass made from carbon neutral electricity, pipes can be copper, and drainage use ceramic like was used until the 80s. Similar for transport, water treatment etc. Perhaps a few specialised uses of PVC and other plastics will remain and the rest go - regulated or priced from existence. Now 95% of coal and horses aren't around we still keep stables for fun, some still enjoy horse racing, steam trains run at weekends and museums run a few steam engines.
Thing is the assumption that the planet could take everything thrown at it used to work - now population has grown so much that no longer applies. JulianMorrison has a point that "it's useful" can no longer be enough - stuff isn't only used by a few wealthy types any more, on a planet with under 1bn, whilst most of those engage in agriculture. We have to learn to consider damage control and restriction far sooner than was necessary even in the 1930s.
My worry is the modern dogma to not want to impact business at all costs. Governments avoid strong regulation, requiring consideration of the land a business occupy, the pollution and waste they cause or the people whose needs they should serve. Essentially they became subservient to multinationals. It will make changing that much harder and fought against much more - not least by those oil interests.
Not easy, but not impossible either. There is precedent after all. :)
The final thing I would say is that if those in control are sincere about tackling climate change, an open borders immigration policy is a very strange thing for them to be promoting. Instead of supporting people to live good lives where they are - in low carbon countries - we are encouraging them to move to high carbon countries, and effectively creating a reason to generate massive amounts of carbon through house building, infrastructure etc. This is one of the main reasons I am sceptical about the messages that come down from on high, and even more so given that the stock response to this issue is accusations of racism etc.
Get rid of plastic forks, spoons, knives, and straws... again no big deal.
Get rid of plastic used in food. Milk jugs, processed food, tv dinners, plastic bags of lemons/potatoes/etc. Kill off water bottles (which are a waste anyways), soda packages in plastic, cheap boxed wine, etc.
Sure there's some harder things, like say fertilizer, car interiors, toys, keyboards, mice, watches, network cables, etc. But still we could hugely reduce are use of oil.
Sadly the world was just starting to move away from oil a bit, then USA went from a large oil importer, to a huge exporter and the prices dropped.
With advances in biotech and possible harnessing of biological nitrogen fixation we might overcome even this...
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.
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.
"half of demand" is not 4%. Or is it another industry? What am I missing?
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.
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?
"About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years." --IPCC AR4
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-lo...
Plastics are a visible but small part of our environmental damage. Plastic straws doubly so.
EDIT: To be clear I am not saying that it is harmless to release lots of CO2 I am saying that we can't compare pollutants by simply looking at the gross tonnage released.
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.
Typically all you need to do to keep microorganisms from eating something is keep it dry. We tend to do that for laptops anyway.
Besides, the assertion wasn't that plastic would still be useful for everything. It just wouldn't be useless.
Plastic vs fuel is not an either/or thing: they're both problems. We probably can't eliminate either of them completely, but we should try to cut back on both as much as we can.
A tax on plastic packaging would be a very good idea.
Even if you take every plastic and drop it into a bin, you're either going to burn it or dump it. Most of the plastic trash in the US is also just shipped to other countries with more lax laws so they just either burn it or dump it. Until we have a proper process for disposing plastics safely and cleanly, we must reduce using it in the ridiculous way we're using it. Single-use plastic bag should never be used if you have a way to use a reusable cloth bag instead.
Because people in the first world won't stand for modern incineration plants. The NIMBYs who would personally be negatively affected spread FUD about a .00001% increased chance of getting cancer or some crap like that.
Burning trash in general is a damn good way to get rid of it. You're left with ash which takes up a fraction of the space and is much easier to contain than the original trash product. Sure, it emits some nasty stuff but when you run an incinerator in the first world you can scrub that out of the exhaust. When you ship that stuff to the 3rd world you lose oversight of what happens to it.
> The solution [is] enforcing existing laws against littering
That's the classic industry argument: it's not their fault if there is pollution, it's the end users that irresponsibly throw stuff away. Ignoring their heavily-funded lobbying to avoid plastic reduction laws and minimize recycling obligations.
Vermont was planning to introduce laws to require reuse of drinks bottles in the 1950s. Coca Cola, Philip Morris, Budweiser and others clubbed together to form and fund "Keep America Beautiful" to advertise and lobby for the problem to be landed on the consumer instead of the businesses that created the problem.
The solution is putting blame back on the producers, where it belongs. Require them to own that externality they created. Oh, and discouraging litter.
I'm having a hard time imagining somebody justifying flying more/further because they aren't using plastic straws in their day-to-day life.
Surely we can work to improve the world on multiple fronts at a time, and if single-use plastics present themselves as both unsustainable long-term and a low-hanging fruit (compared with air travel) in terms of sourcing replacements, then it's reasonable that people would seek to make that small change independent of what is happening in the rest of their lives.
I find this trend of slapping "virtue signalling" on all but the most lofty goals to be a bit disingenuous. It must assume that there is one section of society that is empowered to make all of these changes and that by choosing to pursue single use plastics they suffer the opportunity cost of not developing an alternative means of rapid transport or improved environmental law enforcement.
A single-use-plastic tax which truly takes into consideration the cost of enforcement / cost to the environment and landfill / depletion of a finite resource would have the same effect, sure. I'm not convinced it would escape the "virtue signalling" label, though.
We need to do lots of things, this particular thing is easy to do so we should do it.
I don't buy the argument that because we aren't doing other things that we should not do this too.
You can use the same logic to never do anything at all.
The best thing about these bans is they are very visible and raise awareness, giving you the critical mass you need to solve other issues too.
I think it's more likely to reduce the chance of solving other issues because it uses up people's mental charity budget. Humans are not naturally utilitarian, and good causes compete with each other based on emotion. There's a huge risk of scenarios like this:
>Save the poor orphan puppies!
"Sure, they're cute. Take all the money."
>Repair the historic building!
"Eh, I guess it's important. Here's a small donation."
>Feed the starving children in Africa!
"Didn't we do that already? Not my problem."
>Prevent the death of billions through climate change!
"I'm sick of all these demands. I'm going to start rolling coal just to spite you."
We need to focus on numbers, not emotion, and the numbers don't justify the backlash.
Same way than having shorter circuits to reduce transport, or packaging at the end of the chain, or even smarter selling unpackaged good is a much smarter way to deal with transport pollution.
I love this backlash and I'm really happy to try to my small contribution
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
We would be way better of funding cleanup efforts in these rivers.
Plastic straws improve quality of life? Give me a break.
what about people who do neither.
- ~consigned glass jars - fiber bags
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.
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.
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.
In a word, it wasn't a serious attempt. It may have been the most that could be successfully negotiated, but it wasn't a serious attempt at actually solving the problem.
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Effectiveness for why I say this.)