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Comment by icantevenhold | Hacker News Reader

You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance.

It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable.

Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it.

Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.

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> You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance.

Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience.

Most things you enjoy today are affordable because we have fossil fuels. The entire supply chain of every single product you can imagine is very dependent on fossil fuels. We're not even capable of making proper roads or tires without petroleum derivates, without these two alone nothing gets to you. Investigate a bit, you'll find petroleum and petroleum derivates a prerequisite of virtually everything.

Renewable energies look like a solved problem today with wind and solar, but it seems like everybody forgets that the entire supply chain to make them is 100% petrol dependant from mining raw materials to the final delivery. In a world without petrol these would be orders of magnitude more expensive, if even possible at all.

> Not really, not at this scale, or this price and convenience.

Not at this scale and price and convenience.

We can absolutely do so for higher prices. And with solar panels becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more ubiquitous with each passing year, we may find that a lot of those "higher prices" were really just "higher energy input costs", and we will be able to come very close to what we have now. (I don't know for sure—this isn't an area I keep abreast of.)

You might want to read the whole comment, renewables are only cheap now because every single step of their creation involves fossil fuels. Once everyone wants 60kg of lithium in their car and 100kg for they're home we'll quickly run into the exact same raw ressources problems.

If everything gets 10-100x harder and more expensive to make I can guarantee you the world will become a very different place.

Scale tends to be a bit of a chicken and the egg problem.

regardless, i agree, we aren't totally killing fossil fuels anytime soon.

on the other hand, we don't need to. A reduction in demand by 75% would be world changing, and looks a lot more plausible than no fossil fuels ever.

Yea our lives are too convenient and too much filled with useless stuff that no one really needs anyway - and like other comments pointed out the goal is not to replace petroleum 100% immediately - any reduction would already go a long way.

Seeing that we use about 2/3 of the total for transportation fuel it’s not like we need most of it to build the renewable infrastructure - that’s more like a drop in the bucket.

Most petroleum gets used to propel vehicles, to heat buildings, and to produce electricity - and it’s definitely not without alternative there

Wouldn't the most important thing be the nitrate fertilizers? Do we have anything to replace them?

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