Liquid Wood Is Plastic of Tomorrow, Say Scientists
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Plus it has other properties that are desirable in some situations, such as a wood-like finish.
Sure there are extremely poor people who might not be able to afford the extra money, but anybody concerned with the environment and their health would have sufficient reason to use this material. Another argument is that since plastic is so cheap, even if this liquid wood is many times the price of plastic it can still be affordable.
Never confuse "natural" with healthy. Arsenic (for example) is natural. So is smallpox.
Yes we're not going to belch out more CO2 by harvesting oil. However, we don't grow enough trees to begin with and exponentially increasing the demand for lumber will be a disaster for preventing illegal logging.
I mean global warming will kill off maybe a thousand or so species, where as completely removing the Amazon rainforest will probably kill a million species.
I'm sick of all this pro-green BS that 'saves the planet' whilst killing everything on it. I mean Wind Turbines supposedly reduce carbon emissions, however they're killing thousands of birds and bats which has a drastic effect on the food chain. Bats eat thousands of mosquitoes a day, imagine what'll happen to the rates of malaria and west nile if we expand wind power and extinct all the bats. Not only that but they're killing already endangered animals like the Albatross.
The ecological effect of wind turbines could be far worse than pumping CO2 into our atmosphere ever could be. It's possible for many species to adapt to environmental change, especially birds due to their migratory instincts, however bird's can't adapt to not get hit by rotating blades.
If this turns out to be cheap or not, I think there'll be drastic damage to the world ecology - especially in 3rd world countries.
The issue with climate change is that this is one of the things we think may have caused mass extinctions. So your number seems to be off by a few orders of magnitude.
Not to mention, cutting down rainforests causes global warming to begin with so what's the point of reducing oil consumption if we're going to cause global warming by hacking down trees and thus reducing the worlds ability to remove CO2 and yes rainforests are responsible for 28% of all the worlds oxygen recycling.
Only around 20% of the worlds wood is harvested from sustainable forests, which means for this not to harm the environment sustainable forest use would have to be ramped up five-fold to meet present consumption. Not to mention the estimated demand for lumber is still increasing, meaning it would take around 6-7 times the present sustainable forests to cope with global demand by around 2020. Increasing demand through 'wood plastics' would make this even worse.