You Can’t Build Roads Without Oil

Hole up...so the premise of this article is if we don't burn the top 70% then we can't use the other 30% for other things? Like you couldn't pump off the 70% to a different container to get at the stuff in the bottom? Using the material for other stuff isn't great but it's at least not burning it and releasing it into the atmosphere directly. We'll find other solutions for these other things but in the meantime we'll try to burn less. Article seems a bit nonsense.

The need for oil doesn't go away with the transition to non-petrol cars. It's also used to make plastics and many other industrial products.

Hopefully we will stop burning it and the volume we pump out of the ground will also go down.

We make most of our roads in Florida out of concrete. I am sure asphalt is better for snow but I don’t think I believe that the most powerful country on the planet cannot figure out an alternative to asphalt.

The market will take care of this. The reason we use bitumen now is not because it's the best for the job. We use it because it is cheap. There are other options that are better like cement that last longer. Will the material cost of building roads go up? Probably. Will we be unable to build roads at all? Probably not.

There are also plant based alternatives being researched like Lignin and crystalized salt.

Well yeah that's why roads are black/grey, asphalt is made of oil.

Didn't people know that already?

Also toothpaste, toothbrush, a good amount of medicine and medical products too

> You Can’t Build Roads Without Oil

"Terrific race, the romans. Terrific" Monty Python