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Comment by cafebabbe | Hacker News Reader

Without fossil fuels, no Haber-Bosch process. No Haber-Bosch process, no fertilizers. No fertilizers, no food security.

The Haber-Bosch process is not dependent on fossil fuels. With renewable sources (biogas instead of methane for H2 generation) the process is more expensive, but there are no technical limitations here that mandate the use of fossil fuels.

With advances in biotech and possible harnessing of biological nitrogen fixation we might overcome even this...

And that's just one of the many ways that hydrocarbons are woven into critical parts of the global economy.

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.

Oil-the-chemical and oil-the-fuel can be considered seperate products. Demand-wise, all uses besides fuel are trivial. Even plastic is only 4%. The spritz of 10W-40 on my bike chain is of 0 consequence compared to the gallon of gas burned in a typical daily commute by car. We're never going to run out of oil for all those important non-fuel uses. Even if every oil well ran dry tomorrow, oil-the-chemical is quite easy to make from carbon waste feedstock.

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.

Couldn't put it better.

Without artificial fertilizers, soil depletion can stop and we can start using various permaculture farming techniques instead that can be sustained long term.

Wait, what? What's wrong with composting manure and kitchen scrap?

Contamination in both cases, unfortunately.

What sort of contamination?

Household and commercial cleaning chemicals, agricultural hormones, antibiotics, cleaning chemicals, stuff like that.

Ironically, it's actually chemical fertilizers that destroy our food security long term.

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