This underscores the sadness in burning oil. Plastics allow us to do and make so many useful things. We should be stockpiling oil for this sort of use and only burning it when no other option exists.
...
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Hemp.”
...
“Well, Mr. Herer, did you know that hemp is also marijuana?”
“Yes, of course I know, I’ve been writing about it for about 40 hours a week for the past 17 years.”
“Well, you know marijuana’s illegal, don’t you? You can’t use it.”
“Not even to save the world?”
“No. It’s illegal”, he sternly informed me. “You cannot use something illegal.”
I mean I guess we could melt the ice caps for more water...
Oh wait! I forgot that burning fossil fuels is already melting the ice caps.
I think their point is more "We're already running out of water, aquifer depletion is a thing on multiple continents and there are now cities that have officially run out of fresh water. Adding even more farming, which requires water input above and beyond natural rainfall, is just going to worsen another dire issue".
Hemp (referenced in a sibling thread) is known as weed because it is drought tolerant and often requires less water than non invasive species. Kudzu and Bamboo are also invasive species that are drought tolerant when compared to most and even natural land uses.
You're missing the mass amounts of water to extract plastic from oil.
The water that effectively stays in a closed system and can likely be treated on-site for nearly immediate reuse? The water that doesn't largely evaporate (70 percent of the annual precipitation returns to the atmosphere by evaporation, I assume water from irrigation is still several tens of percent) and cause soil erosion?
It takes 180 L of water to produce 1 kg of plastic and 302-492 L for 1kg of hemp based on a quick Google query.
The insane amount of water they use for oil refinement is causing the entire surrounding area to leech hard water. What was once the softest table in the region is now becoming infested with salt water.
I have seen the water table schematics, I used to live a couple of miles from the plant and I can tell you that even in the last decade it's gotten noticeably worse.
This is objectively worse than the alternative, using hemp for biodiesel and bioplastics which requires far less water and doesn't ruin the environment.
[0] https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_cadd93c...
Something like 10% is what gets used to as raw chemicals for further manufacture of goods. Overall about 5% of the original crude gets manufactured into PVC/polystyrene/nylon/PU/PP/polyester etc.
I was specifically comparing the amount of water to manufacture 1kg of plastic and 1kg of dry hemp.
I've been told that the plastic companies would prefer to burn it for energy for disposal, the idea being that it was destined to be energy, and that path had a short detour as a cup. Not saying its a great plan, but it's a plan that let's them sell more plastic.