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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Much of that isn't fuel but rather chemical feedstock. There is a plausible path to significantly reduce fossil fuel use for transportation and energy. But finding another economically viable way to manufacture fertilizers, asphalt, and plastics is a much harder problem.

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I think we can/should greatly reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible. This mostly requires political will / habit changes. Although creating circular systems for e.g. food containers has its challenges, it's not moon shot difficult, we have these systems on small scales and we just need more people to use them.

I agree that fertilizer is a very difficult problem, it's possibly the hardest problem related to fossil fuels. Low-Tech Mag has covered this to some degree, and I'm in awe of the scale of the issue, as well as the dire effects of not figuring it out (people starving). https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/03/urban-fish-ponds-l... To some degree, I figure we'll just have to accept fertilizer as the last legitimate use of fossil fuels until we completely rebuild our farms / food production and sewage systems to be circular.

>reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible

In favor of what? Paper or bamboo fiber? Europe has no trees, where will they get it from? How do you suppose it will be transported?

How about in favour of people getting their fruit and veg not wrapped in superfluous anything. You're really asking the wrong question here. And yes, most of our copious quantities of fruit and veg comes without wrapping.

There's plenty of natural fibre based alternatives for a significant portion of plastic usage, otherwise reusable glass, ceramic, metal and wooden containers can fill a need, and be locally produced.

Trees can be farmed, and I would like to see pollarding and coppicing used for paper manufacture

Europe has no trees? Are you joking? This is ChatGPT-level hallucination stated with ChatGPT-level confidence. On a side note, a few European firms manufacture single-use plates and cutlery from agricultural waste (wheat bran). Really good products, and even edible and, frankly, quite tasty (not that you'd want to take more than a nibble as they're 100% fibre).

If we had the energy generation capacity it isn't that hard to replace most chemical feed stocks. The problem has always been that fossil fuel as a reagent is significantly cheaper than the equivalent energy cost to synthesize replacement reagents from other sources. Fertilizer for example can be produced from atmospheric air, the problem is fertilizer already uses 1% of global electricity production, and not using fossil fuels to do it will increase that energy requirement 10 fold, so 10% of global energy production. Another reason we probably should of invested more heavily in nuclear in the past so we could be in a much better place today.

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