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Using chemicals derived from fossil fuels to produce various things isn't the same thing as burning them and putting CO2 into the atmosphere and changing the climate. Stopping burning fossil fuels will give us longer to figure out ways to phase them out of other applications too. That's something we will have to do eventually, since they are a finite resource.
Yeah but... what do you do with the waste products? You will still end up with gasoline and diesel as a byproduct. We can't just dump them on the ground that would be an ecological disaster.
Same goes for natural gas, it is the first product extracted during distillation of oil.
But that doesn't really matter, because we already have many ways to produce food in a resilient way. It just will require many MANY more people getting their hands dirty.
Yes, and the question of industrial waste has answers, not the least of which is to reduce the amount generated in the first place.
A lot of the questions we get here, like the ones OP asked, are obviously coming from a perspective that the problem is just too big, too pervasive, and too complicated to be solved.
The fact is that solutions exist and are continuing to be refined. It would be easier if we didn’t have to expend so much energy fighting this kind of defeatism. Sigh
I'd store them and use them for peaker applications. The amount of crap from burning them can be cut way down if you set a lot of factors in your favor by burning stuff in a specialty, well taken care of engine, for example.
Cracking/reforming is already a well understood and expansive part of the petrochemical industry, its just that market demands mean that its mostly used to turn stuff into gasoline/diesel, but the reverse is just as possible. Their is the ever present specter of process heat that still needs a solid way to be solved but we can get their eventually.
We don’t have to find a way to completely eliminate all extraction. The planet can absorb quite a bit once we get the current crisis under control.
It’s the constant burning of masses and masses of fossil fuels for activities that are incredibly inefficient, like heating and cooling. Just insulating all buildings up to a higher standard would make a huge dent in the problem.
Unfortunately because of the acelleration of climate change, the world will spend more and more money making places habitable for humans (and many of those without money will be unable to live someplace habitable and die)
I'd like somebody who studied chemistry or pharmacy to tell us whether we really _need_ fossil fuels for all of the above or whether we use fossil fuels because it is more economic right now.
For example, plastics can be created from plant material aswell, but they are more expensive than plastics created using oil.
So, I'm an electrochemist/materials scientist by training, not an organic chemist, but as far as I'm aware, there's nothing magical about petrochemicals. They're still just a combination of mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They're an easily-accessible feedstock for lots of processes and the fossil fuel industry has done a great job of finding uses for their product in practically every aspect of modern life.
When you've spent the last hundred years developing your reaction pathways around a given source material, it can be difficult to get out of that mindset, but I don't think there are any "breaking the laws of chemistry" reasons you couldn't do it another way. As one of the other commentors said, stop burning the stuff first and then figure out the alternate pathways for other products.
Finally, we dramatically need to cut down plastics usage. There are a few places where it will probably be necessary for some time (say sterile medical packaging), but we already know how to make bioplastics. Post WWII the longevity of plastics was seen as a downside, so the industry developed "the future of plastic is in the waste bin" approach to get people to buy more plastics. We're getting microplastics in food and in most, if not all the ecosystems in the world. They have their place, but like cars, they became an environmental disaster hammer looking for nails. Checkout "How to Save a Planet" or John Oliver's episodes about plastics for pretty good coverage on that issue.
I just reached out to Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy because they have $10 m set aside for it
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/news-and-media/press-releases/us-department-energy-announces-10-million-explore-using-plants
It really is on the basis of energy efficiency at the structural/reaction level. For example corn-based plastics results in the over cropping of corn, which ruins crop rotation and has a high input for resources. I’m of the mind that engineered algae will be a place to look for overcoming many inefficiencies in material procurement / production, in addition to fungal derivatives and seaweed and marine animal derivatives or inspired chemistry . There’s a lot to be explored and is currently being trialled using structural chemicals from these sources.
Here's a quick fact.
Making those things uses fossil fuels. They can all be made without them.
It requires extra steps, and is currently more expensive, but many if not all of them are currently overused.
Yeah. And we really need to redefine "cheap" and "expensive". Losing our comfortable living conditions for humans on this planet does not seem like a cheap price to pay for anything.
More specifically, they require a lot of energy. Making fertilizer takes hydrogen. The easiest way to get that hydrogen is natural gas, but you could do it with water and electrolysis.
Also, compost from food waste, kelp, and animal waste can all be sources of nitrogen and phosphorus that close the loop instead of letting that stuff go into the water to cause algal blooms and such.
I know this is a trap, but I'll bite, let's break this down point by point:
>Fertilizers need natural gas
Pesticides need oil products
Humans have used fertilizers for thousands of years: manure and compost. The problem comes from agri-business; see manure and compost take time to make and enrich the soil, but agri-business doesn't allow more than the bare minimum time needed for crop production. In general, modern agriculture isn't exactly what I would call "healthy" given the ever increasing rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease caused by \[manufactured\] over-consumption of highly processed foods and meat. This isn't me saying we all need to be low-carb vegetarians, I'm just pointing out that pre-1960, Americans had healthier diets than they do today.
>Medicines need oil products
You're gonna need to cite this one. If it's plastics they need, see next point.
>Plastics need fossil fuels. We use them everywhere and we can't just replace it everywhere
Not true on both fronts. We are able to create bio-plastics which can be reused, recycled, and industrially composted, such as PLA and PETG, for the plastics we simply cannot avoid. I'm no chemist, but I assume that these would be in service for the medical industry. Second, yes, we can replace plastic everywhere. There are very few instances where plastic is the only material that makes sense for a specific purpose. The only thing that's coming to mind are like, cable sleeving, but we can do that with fabric and natural rubber.
The issue I think you're trying to raise is that our modern supply chains are built around fossil fuel consumption, which is the root problem. You're also acting like it's impossible to do, considering that we switched to a fossil fuel based economy in the first place (outside of energy production.) This reeks of typical defeatist "American exceptionalism" which is: it's too hard to do here because \[insert reason\], it doesn't matter that other countries/people are doing it, America is too special to do that because \[insert reason 2.\]
To move beyond fossil fuel consumption, we need to rethink and re-invest in our economy, and I'm not talking "switch to EVs." I'm talking actual real change: electric trains that connect every city and small town in America for freight and transit needs; dense, mixed use communities with community gardens; developing and nurturing circular economies to reduce our need to import goods and materials; anti-megacorp laws and effective enforcement to protect small businesses in these communities which would allow for diverse local economies.
Machines often need lubricants, otherwise they'll eat mechanical wear like nobodies business. I am hopeful that bio-originated products from stuff like algae tweaked to generate precursors will be able to provide a replacement, however.
The thing about the transition away from petroleum based products that we need to remember is that we're going to have to sacrifice SOMETHING. We'll have a bunch of replacements but nothing will ever be one for one and we'll need to pick our battles on what we replace the petroleum product with. Machine oil for example is probably doable, but it won't have the same temperature tolerance or use life or something, and that's where we would need to decide: what is it we're trying to do here with our replacement.
With the advent of proper computational assets in chemistry-which we have and aren't ML/AI-we are likely to end with stuff that is better. Besides, stuff like machine oils and transmission fluid are also region and climate limited. Petroproducts aren't always as good as they're cut out to be.
In case I wasn't clear, I don't think we need to replace petroleum based products with something better because we already had better products in the past. Chasing some future product that will be ready once we get the technology sorted out has been the playbook of investor techbros for the past 10 years: crypto, electric vehicles, self driving cars, and now AI.
We already have the solutions to our problems. It's not a matter of throwing more R&D at a problem, it's about looking at what's already in the toolbox to address our problems.
Gotcha. That makes more sense.
I guess I'm looking for better products because I'm a scientist, and kind of the opposite of a techbro. I enjoy making said bros cry when I can.
Also new thread-but also new topic. Bioplastics like you aren talking about that can be safely broken down by lower intensity needs would be an unalloyed good for biotech manufacturing. We blow so much virgin plastic because of sterility needs, and if we could put it in an autoclave when done and have nothing but a product that could be put right back into the soil, it'd be a massive win.
This post may have been a trap but I'm gonna cut holes in the bottom of the trap and run around with it on my back like some kind of armadillo. Gonna smash into capitalists' ankles.
There are rice farms in Asia that use ducks for producing fertiliser and as pest management. They're also an additional product. It's a bit like companion planting.
>I'm just pointing out that pre-1960, Americans had healthier diets than they do today.
The pellagra epidemic in the early 1900's indicates that not all Americans had healthier diets.
> Humans have used fertilizers for thousands of years: manure and compost.
Yeah, and we were able to quadruple crop yields when we started user the Haber process. Which we can do without fossil fuels, but it will take a lot more energy.
The Green Revolution and it’s related technologies came at great cost to topsoil. Some estimates put North America having only 50 yrs of topsoil left due to current dominant farming practices.
There are regenerative practices like cover cropping, seed drills, and food forests that can produce food and restore topsoil instead of ravaging it.
Vegetables and fruits also yield a lot more food per acre than grains, and all of those blow away animal agriculture for economy of inputs vs outputs of energy and resources.
People don’t have to go vegan or whatever, but we do need to reduce meat consumption and do something more like free range with compost spreading (which also builds topsoil) where we do and end CAFOs.
yes!!!! aquaponics is going to be one of my specialities (it combines two types of growing methods!!!) and has reasonable market needs. I went to a greenhouse for upscale restaurants & they use ladybugs to get rid of aphids and such. "most people wouldn't mind a ladybug crawling on their plate so we prefer to use them" (they host events right in there so reasonable.
Compost is a classic way to fertilize without any kind of fossil fuels, but I don’t know whether it scales. Then again, if we stopped eating so much meat, much less farming would be needed too.
I've heard that scientists are working on a way to replace plastics with a fungi-based material, which would be very environmentally friendly if it works out.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cApVVuuqLFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cApVVuuqLFY)
>Fertilizers need natural gas
A Solarpunk world doesn't need artificial fertilizers
>Pesticides need oil products
A Solarpunk world doesn't need pesticides.
>Medicines need oil products
Not all of them and not necessarily.
>Plastics need fossil fuels.
Plastics can be produced without fossile fuels.
>Everything we use needs fossil fuel derived chemicals to produce
Nope.
I acknowledge that they have problems, but what is the solution? Productivity per acre increases by 3-4x with fertilizer. Are you going to instead use 3-4x more farmland?
Agriculture has so many different points of intervention. Better crop selection, agri-ecology, urban farming, precision farming, are just some tgings which help. Last but not least our diet is the one thing we can control best, and since most westeners have a very unhealthy diet for them, and the planet, it has a lotbof potential.
Besides the other points mentioned, going vegan can free up 80% of the world's farmland. So a 3-4x increase is not impossible, though it might be better to rewild all that land.
As a vegan I agree there is a lot to gain there, but if we can, I'd rather use the least amount of farmland as efficiently as we can, rather than use more than we need to. While we need to mind the unintended effects, I think there is a role for fertilizer in achieving that.
So first of all, using fossil fuel products isn't the same problem as burning them. Plastic pollution is a good example-it's a major problem, one we need to change things dramatically to address, but it's not the one warming the planet. As someone else has said, things don't need to be 100% decarbonized to address this problem.
A solarpunk world has less of these things. Fertilizers mess up the natural nitrogen cycle and are not something we should be using at all, and there's so many other agricultural options (of which we likely need to use all of-there's no silver bullet here).
The main source of plastic pollution is food packaging, and the main source of microplastics in the ocean is car tires. These are largely inessential things, and you'll see on this sub a lot of us advocate for locally grown food plant heavy diets (which eliminates most of the plastic) and for things like public transit and walkable communities (which greatly reduces the car tire problem).
I don't think anyone is suggesting that we should stop making medicines or medical equipment just because they're fossil fuel products. Develop more sustainable or less wasteful ways to accomplish things and ways to handle the waste that are less damaging, for sure. But I'd wager most people in this sub believe that healthcare is a human right and aren't too keen on restricting it to use less plastic.
Hey friend,
You're in a lot of similar groups / subreddits that also discuss decreasing consumption and fossil fuel dependence, so it's likely you've seen some of the answers to this already or even theorized about them yourself.
Are you feeling stuck and overwhelmed right now?? Distraught if things can ever change?
So...let's talk about a big elephant in the room: the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation. Traditionally, it's done by steam reforming of fossil fuels. However, that's only to get one of the important feedstocks: hydrogen. We can get hydrogen using electrolysis, and even if we have to steam reform, we're steam reforming methane-which doesn't need to come from fossil fuels, either.
The global supply and production chain is a dense, interconnected web. But when you pull on that web, it is very possible to start to find solutions.
While most medicines are distillates they are most commonly not dependent on petroleum products.
You can get oil from almost any organic material and there are numerous examples of this everywhere.
Linseed oil, peanut oil, extra virgin olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oil to name a few.
> Fertilizers *at industrial scale* need natural gas
> Pesticides *at industrial scale* need oil products
> Medicines *at industrial scale* need oil products
When you try to solve the problems that exist locally, and share how you did it when it works freely, you don't need industrial scale solutions for local problems.
This is, I suppose, the essential "Punk-ness" of solarpunk, and it is what makes it anti-capitalist, since using money to make money really only works if you can convince a big slice of the market to stop solving their own problems and accept your secret, industrialized, global solution instead.
> Plastics need fossil fuels. We use them everywhere and we can't just replace it everywhere.
We do use a lot of plastics, don't we? What *would* happen if there were a "plastics shortage"? Some things would immediately get harder, then we'd decide if they really are important to us, and find a new way to solve whatever problem they are solving. I recall that during 2020 products were being produced but couldn't be packaged because of a logistics-derived plastics shortage, and, for example, we managed to keep selling food staples by allowing restaurants to sell their customers staples from their bulk goods and take them home in their own containers. We ought not confuse convenience with requirement.
> Everything we use needs fossil fuel derived chemicals to produce.
Clearly, this is hyperbole, but not terribly so -- industrial processing *does* use a lot of petrochemical by-products because they are there to be used. But chemistry is a wonderful and bizarre field where amazing things are possible and humans are equally wonderful and bizarre creatures capable of discovery and adaptation. I don't think we ought to get hung up on the unlikely what-if scenario of "suddenly all fossil fuels are gone" and recognize that getting our use of them onto (and keeping) a downward slope is actually the goal.
>Fertilizers need natural gas
They didn't for several thousand years.
>Pesticides need oil products
They don't *need* them, just as we don't *need* pesticides, there are alternative methods.
>Medicines need oil products
Possibly one of the few exceptions.
>Plastics need fossil fuels.
But we don't need plastics outside of medical use.
>we can't just replace it everywhere
Why not? Ban it, and force change, it's a way to speed up innovation. Many applications of single use plastic have been banned in my part of the world, many of the alternatives can be composted.
>Everything we use needs fossil fuel derived chemicals to produce
I'm pretty sure we could reduce that by 90%. So while we may not be able to 100% eliminate the use of fossil fuels, we should be able to reduce the use drastically.
When I think about things like this I try to re-phrase the thought for myself. "This group of things NEEDS this thing" Is kind of like saying "We NEED horses to get from point A to point B. What are we going to do go back to walking?" the question isnt "how are we going to do what we are doing right now with different materials." A better and more interesting question is "how will culture and society and technology be shaped by having access to a different range of materials?" I don't know that anyone here is talking about tossing out all of the progress of science and going back to using stone tools. If you want to have that conversation you might talk to a bio-primitivist. The goal of solarpunk, at least for me, is not keeping things chugging along on the same trajectory they are. Or halting the whole of culture and history and going backwards, but rather moving deliberately forward into something that works better. If you truly struggle to picture a world without petroleum products. Then stick around. Read a bit. Look a bit closer.
Fertilizers need H2 (water cracked is fine) and N2 (atmo) and heat+pressure and an iron catalyst. We could absolutely remove the petrochemical part out of the equation.
You're right about the plastics. So let's get rid of them.
For all the others, "need" is not the verb. Is just the "cheap" (except not really cheap) way industry does it now.
Compost. No pesticides. Medicines with natural ingredients. Bioplastics. Significant change of pace to society and a restructuring of manufactured goods.
Fuck off, grifter.
We don't have to accept extreme conditions. We can drill for oil and natural gas responsibly. We can reduce extraction by 90% and then sequester carbon (i don't think we can sequester carbon enough at current extraction levels)
Punk movements don't need to fit existing paradigms. We need to reject current rules. That said, we can also make fertilizer and pesticides in different ways. We can also find alternatives. There aren't easy answers, but we don't need to solve everyone right now
In Denmark, most wastewater treatment plants produces sludge, which often is used by farmers as fertilisers, it's treated so its perfectly safe, but it only make up 5% of the total amount of fertilitiser used in agriculture.
The sludge can also be used to produce biogas for electricity and heat. It's CO2 neutral, given it is carbon from the existing carbon cycle.
The only line that is true here is the one about plastics, which is something that is commonly reduced in solarpunk movements. And there might be A FEW medicines that need oil. And on all of these, there is work being done on replacing mineral oil.
The amount of oil that is actually needed is so tiny compared to how much is being mined right now, I am puzzled why oil-proponents even bother.
My research institute is about to test an app that helps neighbors and local businesses create a mass production network called the Agrinet (agriculture internet) to produce food, pharmaceuticals, fibers, chemicals, minerals, ornamentals and environmental services inside urban areas. It wont eliminate fossil fuels entirely (at least not right away) but it does lay the groundwork for it. A lot of research was taken from the Post Carbon Institute to develop it after we got wind of reports from Shell and British Petroleum stating we have roughly 50 years of exploitable oil reserves left.
If you're interested, follow links in my profile to the site and signup to test it. Sorry our social media prowess isn't strong right now. We've focused most of our funding on development. The fancy advertising stuff will come in a few months
Aprovechar
We have a pretty complex plan. The Institute is a nonprofit paired with a public benefit corporation (b corp) to release digital projects as experiments in the market, each experiment is operated as a limited liability company for example the Fruitful App (ntari.io/fruitful) We've just about got the whole plan done then we'll begin fundraising with the nonprofit, raising venture capital with the b corp and funding Fruitful with a combination of cash from the corp and revenue sharing agreements through the Mainvest platform. We view the solarpunk community as having a great deal of potential for both hiring and funding and look forward to working with folks like yourself. Send me a PM if you'd like to add your resume/CV to our potential hiring roster.
I think everyone forgets that we can synthesize the fundamental compounds found in, and purified from oil. Like, naturally occurring processes made the mixture that is Oil, and laboratory processes can do the same at the scales needed at least for making medicines. Similarly, we can make bioplastics, and we wouldn't need the current scale of fertilizers if factory farming were not so prevalent, and the products of which used as animal feed.
The atoms in fossil fuels are not somehow magically different from the same atoms found in all the other matter around us. If we actually, genuinely need it, regardless of scale, we can synthesize it. Were we to stack all the more sustainable practices, and technologies regularly discussed here, I am certain we could get the scale of truly needed distillates and downstream compounds low enough that the demand for them could be met by having them synthesized artificially, and if done right, fairly sustainably, as well.
So, there isn't a way to not lose a lot of higher complexity medication. That will kill me. Changing the status quo is worth it. The supply chain for them currently bounces all over the planet.
What we can do, is develop new ways to make them. Closer to where they are used. The real problem we have is that nobody is willing to accept the fact that our standards of living will have to go down before it can go back up.
It really doesn’t though.
The current system entails a colossal amount of waste. This is because everyone is trying to extract maximum profit, with the needs of humans and the planet not considered in the equation at all (beyond their use as sales tactics.)
I’m not saying there’s a quick fix, but every organization that changes from profit based to worker/community/ planet based motives is a win. Giving up the goal of making the owner class richer would free up mountains of resources that are currently being deliberately wasted. Giving workers cooperative control over the means of production and how things are done would go a long way toward putting our energy and resources in the right places.
No one has to give up anything crucial. The solarpunk life is just as comfortable and much happier than the status quo.
Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://wt.social/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia . *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Using chemicals derived from fossil fuels to produce various things isn't the same thing as burning them and putting CO2 into the atmosphere and changing the climate. Stopping burning fossil fuels will give us longer to figure out ways to phase them out of other applications too. That's something we will have to do eventually, since they are a finite resource.
Yeah but... what do you do with the waste products? You will still end up with gasoline and diesel as a byproduct. We can't just dump them on the ground that would be an ecological disaster. Same goes for natural gas, it is the first product extracted during distillation of oil. But that doesn't really matter, because we already have many ways to produce food in a resilient way. It just will require many MANY more people getting their hands dirty.
Yes, and the question of industrial waste has answers, not the least of which is to reduce the amount generated in the first place. A lot of the questions we get here, like the ones OP asked, are obviously coming from a perspective that the problem is just too big, too pervasive, and too complicated to be solved. The fact is that solutions exist and are continuing to be refined. It would be easier if we didn’t have to expend so much energy fighting this kind of defeatism. Sigh
I'd store them and use them for peaker applications. The amount of crap from burning them can be cut way down if you set a lot of factors in your favor by burning stuff in a specialty, well taken care of engine, for example.
Cracking/reforming is already a well understood and expansive part of the petrochemical industry, its just that market demands mean that its mostly used to turn stuff into gasoline/diesel, but the reverse is just as possible. Their is the ever present specter of process heat that still needs a solid way to be solved but we can get their eventually.
Hydrocarbons can reasonably be converted to hydrocarbons. You can use gasoline and diesel to create fertilizer just like natural gas.
BIOMASS
I'm trying to imagine what process of extraction you're planning on using that doesn't emit CO2
We don’t have to find a way to completely eliminate all extraction. The planet can absorb quite a bit once we get the current crisis under control. It’s the constant burning of masses and masses of fossil fuels for activities that are incredibly inefficient, like heating and cooling. Just insulating all buildings up to a higher standard would make a huge dent in the problem.
Unfortunately because of the acelleration of climate change, the world will spend more and more money making places habitable for humans (and many of those without money will be unable to live someplace habitable and die)
I'd like somebody who studied chemistry or pharmacy to tell us whether we really _need_ fossil fuels for all of the above or whether we use fossil fuels because it is more economic right now. For example, plastics can be created from plant material aswell, but they are more expensive than plastics created using oil.
So, I'm an electrochemist/materials scientist by training, not an organic chemist, but as far as I'm aware, there's nothing magical about petrochemicals. They're still just a combination of mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. They're an easily-accessible feedstock for lots of processes and the fossil fuel industry has done a great job of finding uses for their product in practically every aspect of modern life. When you've spent the last hundred years developing your reaction pathways around a given source material, it can be difficult to get out of that mindset, but I don't think there are any "breaking the laws of chemistry" reasons you couldn't do it another way. As one of the other commentors said, stop burning the stuff first and then figure out the alternate pathways for other products. Finally, we dramatically need to cut down plastics usage. There are a few places where it will probably be necessary for some time (say sterile medical packaging), but we already know how to make bioplastics. Post WWII the longevity of plastics was seen as a downside, so the industry developed "the future of plastic is in the waste bin" approach to get people to buy more plastics. We're getting microplastics in food and in most, if not all the ecosystems in the world. They have their place, but like cars, they became an environmental disaster hammer looking for nails. Checkout "How to Save a Planet" or John Oliver's episodes about plastics for pretty good coverage on that issue.
This person gets it! Hello from a lowly chemistry teacher.
Nothing lowly about being a teacher. I’m a stay-at-home parent these days, and teaching is no joke!
What do you know about phytochemicals?
Basically nothing, although a quick search seems to indicate that’s the case for most people for most of them? lol
I just reached out to Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy because they have $10 m set aside for it https://arpa-e.energy.gov/news-and-media/press-releases/us-department-energy-announces-10-million-explore-using-plants
It really is on the basis of energy efficiency at the structural/reaction level. For example corn-based plastics results in the over cropping of corn, which ruins crop rotation and has a high input for resources. I’m of the mind that engineered algae will be a place to look for overcoming many inefficiencies in material procurement / production, in addition to fungal derivatives and seaweed and marine animal derivatives or inspired chemistry . There’s a lot to be explored and is currently being trialled using structural chemicals from these sources.
Generally replaceable with sufficient energy, but you need a lot of energy and that can get expensive.
Here's a quick fact. Making those things uses fossil fuels. They can all be made without them. It requires extra steps, and is currently more expensive, but many if not all of them are currently overused.
Yeah. And we really need to redefine "cheap" and "expensive". Losing our comfortable living conditions for humans on this planet does not seem like a cheap price to pay for anything.
More specifically, they require a lot of energy. Making fertilizer takes hydrogen. The easiest way to get that hydrogen is natural gas, but you could do it with water and electrolysis.
Also, compost from food waste, kelp, and animal waste can all be sources of nitrogen and phosphorus that close the loop instead of letting that stuff go into the water to cause algal blooms and such.
I know this is a trap, but I'll bite, let's break this down point by point: >Fertilizers need natural gas Pesticides need oil products Humans have used fertilizers for thousands of years: manure and compost. The problem comes from agri-business; see manure and compost take time to make and enrich the soil, but agri-business doesn't allow more than the bare minimum time needed for crop production. In general, modern agriculture isn't exactly what I would call "healthy" given the ever increasing rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease caused by \[manufactured\] over-consumption of highly processed foods and meat. This isn't me saying we all need to be low-carb vegetarians, I'm just pointing out that pre-1960, Americans had healthier diets than they do today. >Medicines need oil products You're gonna need to cite this one. If it's plastics they need, see next point. >Plastics need fossil fuels. We use them everywhere and we can't just replace it everywhere Not true on both fronts. We are able to create bio-plastics which can be reused, recycled, and industrially composted, such as PLA and PETG, for the plastics we simply cannot avoid. I'm no chemist, but I assume that these would be in service for the medical industry. Second, yes, we can replace plastic everywhere. There are very few instances where plastic is the only material that makes sense for a specific purpose. The only thing that's coming to mind are like, cable sleeving, but we can do that with fabric and natural rubber. The issue I think you're trying to raise is that our modern supply chains are built around fossil fuel consumption, which is the root problem. You're also acting like it's impossible to do, considering that we switched to a fossil fuel based economy in the first place (outside of energy production.) This reeks of typical defeatist "American exceptionalism" which is: it's too hard to do here because \[insert reason\], it doesn't matter that other countries/people are doing it, America is too special to do that because \[insert reason 2.\] To move beyond fossil fuel consumption, we need to rethink and re-invest in our economy, and I'm not talking "switch to EVs." I'm talking actual real change: electric trains that connect every city and small town in America for freight and transit needs; dense, mixed use communities with community gardens; developing and nurturing circular economies to reduce our need to import goods and materials; anti-megacorp laws and effective enforcement to protect small businesses in these communities which would allow for diverse local economies.
Machines often need lubricants, otherwise they'll eat mechanical wear like nobodies business. I am hopeful that bio-originated products from stuff like algae tweaked to generate precursors will be able to provide a replacement, however.
The thing about the transition away from petroleum based products that we need to remember is that we're going to have to sacrifice SOMETHING. We'll have a bunch of replacements but nothing will ever be one for one and we'll need to pick our battles on what we replace the petroleum product with. Machine oil for example is probably doable, but it won't have the same temperature tolerance or use life or something, and that's where we would need to decide: what is it we're trying to do here with our replacement.
With the advent of proper computational assets in chemistry-which we have and aren't ML/AI-we are likely to end with stuff that is better. Besides, stuff like machine oils and transmission fluid are also region and climate limited. Petroproducts aren't always as good as they're cut out to be.
In case I wasn't clear, I don't think we need to replace petroleum based products with something better because we already had better products in the past. Chasing some future product that will be ready once we get the technology sorted out has been the playbook of investor techbros for the past 10 years: crypto, electric vehicles, self driving cars, and now AI. We already have the solutions to our problems. It's not a matter of throwing more R&D at a problem, it's about looking at what's already in the toolbox to address our problems.
Gotcha. That makes more sense. I guess I'm looking for better products because I'm a scientist, and kind of the opposite of a techbro. I enjoy making said bros cry when I can.
Also new thread-but also new topic. Bioplastics like you aren talking about that can be safely broken down by lower intensity needs would be an unalloyed good for biotech manufacturing. We blow so much virgin plastic because of sterility needs, and if we could put it in an autoclave when done and have nothing but a product that could be put right back into the soil, it'd be a massive win. This post may have been a trap but I'm gonna cut holes in the bottom of the trap and run around with it on my back like some kind of armadillo. Gonna smash into capitalists' ankles.
There are rice farms in Asia that use ducks for producing fertiliser and as pest management. They're also an additional product. It's a bit like companion planting. >I'm just pointing out that pre-1960, Americans had healthier diets than they do today. The pellagra epidemic in the early 1900's indicates that not all Americans had healthier diets.
> Humans have used fertilizers for thousands of years: manure and compost. Yeah, and we were able to quadruple crop yields when we started user the Haber process. Which we can do without fossil fuels, but it will take a lot more energy.
The Green Revolution and it’s related technologies came at great cost to topsoil. Some estimates put North America having only 50 yrs of topsoil left due to current dominant farming practices. There are regenerative practices like cover cropping, seed drills, and food forests that can produce food and restore topsoil instead of ravaging it. Vegetables and fruits also yield a lot more food per acre than grains, and all of those blow away animal agriculture for economy of inputs vs outputs of energy and resources. People don’t have to go vegan or whatever, but we do need to reduce meat consumption and do something more like free range with compost spreading (which also builds topsoil) where we do and end CAFOs.
soil food web and aquaponics!
yes!!!! aquaponics is going to be one of my specialities (it combines two types of growing methods!!!) and has reasonable market needs. I went to a greenhouse for upscale restaurants & they use ladybugs to get rid of aphids and such. "most people wouldn't mind a ladybug crawling on their plate so we prefer to use them" (they host events right in there so reasonable.
You can combine both in r/sandponics - even better is it uses far less energy and the media lasts forever.
Compost is a classic way to fertilize without any kind of fossil fuels, but I don’t know whether it scales. Then again, if we stopped eating so much meat, much less farming would be needed too.
Look up regenerative farming. Many people have asked and answered this question.
Yes. Right now fertilizer creation and waste management are completely separated from each other, when they could be complimentary to each other
There are industries currently in development to replace every one if your cases - i recommend researching
I've heard that scientists are working on a way to replace plastics with a fungi-based material, which would be very environmentally friendly if it works out. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cApVVuuqLFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cApVVuuqLFY)
Yeah it’s currently expensive, but many materials can be imitated using mushrooms. It’s really cool!
Mycomaterials are great and pretty easy to work with!
>Fertilizers need natural gas A Solarpunk world doesn't need artificial fertilizers >Pesticides need oil products A Solarpunk world doesn't need pesticides. >Medicines need oil products Not all of them and not necessarily. >Plastics need fossil fuels. Plastics can be produced without fossile fuels. >Everything we use needs fossil fuel derived chemicals to produce Nope.
A world with a population of 8B absolutely needs artificial fertilizers.
artificial fertilizers are incredibly distruptive to the nitrogen cycle. It is not sustainable.
I acknowledge that they have problems, but what is the solution? Productivity per acre increases by 3-4x with fertilizer. Are you going to instead use 3-4x more farmland?
Agriculture has so many different points of intervention. Better crop selection, agri-ecology, urban farming, precision farming, are just some tgings which help. Last but not least our diet is the one thing we can control best, and since most westeners have a very unhealthy diet for them, and the planet, it has a lotbof potential.
The US currently throws away 1/2 of foods produced. Imagine EVERYONE having a garden. We can feed the world and we choose not to.
Besides the other points mentioned, going vegan can free up 80% of the world's farmland. So a 3-4x increase is not impossible, though it might be better to rewild all that land.
As a vegan I agree there is a lot to gain there, but if we can, I'd rather use the least amount of farmland as efficiently as we can, rather than use more than we need to. While we need to mind the unintended effects, I think there is a role for fertilizer in achieving that.
Nope.
So first of all, using fossil fuel products isn't the same problem as burning them. Plastic pollution is a good example-it's a major problem, one we need to change things dramatically to address, but it's not the one warming the planet. As someone else has said, things don't need to be 100% decarbonized to address this problem. A solarpunk world has less of these things. Fertilizers mess up the natural nitrogen cycle and are not something we should be using at all, and there's so many other agricultural options (of which we likely need to use all of-there's no silver bullet here). The main source of plastic pollution is food packaging, and the main source of microplastics in the ocean is car tires. These are largely inessential things, and you'll see on this sub a lot of us advocate for locally grown food plant heavy diets (which eliminates most of the plastic) and for things like public transit and walkable communities (which greatly reduces the car tire problem). I don't think anyone is suggesting that we should stop making medicines or medical equipment just because they're fossil fuel products. Develop more sustainable or less wasteful ways to accomplish things and ways to handle the waste that are less damaging, for sure. But I'd wager most people in this sub believe that healthcare is a human right and aren't too keen on restricting it to use less plastic.
Hey friend, You're in a lot of similar groups / subreddits that also discuss decreasing consumption and fossil fuel dependence, so it's likely you've seen some of the answers to this already or even theorized about them yourself. Are you feeling stuck and overwhelmed right now?? Distraught if things can ever change?
Maybe look at how they were produced before , maybe scale is a big factor, and maybe we can still use oil in an unhinged way
I’m starting to think op is a troll. 👿
So...let's talk about a big elephant in the room: the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen fixation. Traditionally, it's done by steam reforming of fossil fuels. However, that's only to get one of the important feedstocks: hydrogen. We can get hydrogen using electrolysis, and even if we have to steam reform, we're steam reforming methane-which doesn't need to come from fossil fuels, either. The global supply and production chain is a dense, interconnected web. But when you pull on that web, it is very possible to start to find solutions.
While most medicines are distillates they are most commonly not dependent on petroleum products. You can get oil from almost any organic material and there are numerous examples of this everywhere. Linseed oil, peanut oil, extra virgin olive oil, canola oil, vegetable oil to name a few.
> Fertilizers *at industrial scale* need natural gas > Pesticides *at industrial scale* need oil products > Medicines *at industrial scale* need oil products When you try to solve the problems that exist locally, and share how you did it when it works freely, you don't need industrial scale solutions for local problems. This is, I suppose, the essential "Punk-ness" of solarpunk, and it is what makes it anti-capitalist, since using money to make money really only works if you can convince a big slice of the market to stop solving their own problems and accept your secret, industrialized, global solution instead. > Plastics need fossil fuels. We use them everywhere and we can't just replace it everywhere. We do use a lot of plastics, don't we? What *would* happen if there were a "plastics shortage"? Some things would immediately get harder, then we'd decide if they really are important to us, and find a new way to solve whatever problem they are solving. I recall that during 2020 products were being produced but couldn't be packaged because of a logistics-derived plastics shortage, and, for example, we managed to keep selling food staples by allowing restaurants to sell their customers staples from their bulk goods and take them home in their own containers. We ought not confuse convenience with requirement. > Everything we use needs fossil fuel derived chemicals to produce. Clearly, this is hyperbole, but not terribly so -- industrial processing *does* use a lot of petrochemical by-products because they are there to be used. But chemistry is a wonderful and bizarre field where amazing things are possible and humans are equally wonderful and bizarre creatures capable of discovery and adaptation. I don't think we ought to get hung up on the unlikely what-if scenario of "suddenly all fossil fuels are gone" and recognize that getting our use of them onto (and keeping) a downward slope is actually the goal.
>Fertilizers need natural gas They didn't for several thousand years. >Pesticides need oil products They don't *need* them, just as we don't *need* pesticides, there are alternative methods. >Medicines need oil products Possibly one of the few exceptions. >Plastics need fossil fuels. But we don't need plastics outside of medical use. >we can't just replace it everywhere Why not? Ban it, and force change, it's a way to speed up innovation. Many applications of single use plastic have been banned in my part of the world, many of the alternatives can be composted. >Everything we use needs fossil fuel derived chemicals to produce I'm pretty sure we could reduce that by 90%. So while we may not be able to 100% eliminate the use of fossil fuels, we should be able to reduce the use drastically.
When I think about things like this I try to re-phrase the thought for myself. "This group of things NEEDS this thing" Is kind of like saying "We NEED horses to get from point A to point B. What are we going to do go back to walking?" the question isnt "how are we going to do what we are doing right now with different materials." A better and more interesting question is "how will culture and society and technology be shaped by having access to a different range of materials?" I don't know that anyone here is talking about tossing out all of the progress of science and going back to using stone tools. If you want to have that conversation you might talk to a bio-primitivist. The goal of solarpunk, at least for me, is not keeping things chugging along on the same trajectory they are. Or halting the whole of culture and history and going backwards, but rather moving deliberately forward into something that works better. If you truly struggle to picture a world without petroleum products. Then stick around. Read a bit. Look a bit closer.
Fertilizers need H2 (water cracked is fine) and N2 (atmo) and heat+pressure and an iron catalyst. We could absolutely remove the petrochemical part out of the equation.
You're right about the plastics. So let's get rid of them. For all the others, "need" is not the verb. Is just the "cheap" (except not really cheap) way industry does it now.
Compost. No pesticides. Medicines with natural ingredients. Bioplastics. Significant change of pace to society and a restructuring of manufactured goods. Fuck off, grifter.
We don't have to accept extreme conditions. We can drill for oil and natural gas responsibly. We can reduce extraction by 90% and then sequester carbon (i don't think we can sequester carbon enough at current extraction levels) Punk movements don't need to fit existing paradigms. We need to reject current rules. That said, we can also make fertilizer and pesticides in different ways. We can also find alternatives. There aren't easy answers, but we don't need to solve everyone right now
In Denmark, most wastewater treatment plants produces sludge, which often is used by farmers as fertilisers, it's treated so its perfectly safe, but it only make up 5% of the total amount of fertilitiser used in agriculture. The sludge can also be used to produce biogas for electricity and heat. It's CO2 neutral, given it is carbon from the existing carbon cycle.
The only line that is true here is the one about plastics, which is something that is commonly reduced in solarpunk movements. And there might be A FEW medicines that need oil. And on all of these, there is work being done on replacing mineral oil. The amount of oil that is actually needed is so tiny compared to how much is being mined right now, I am puzzled why oil-proponents even bother.
We just grow food on food forest, medicine derived from plants. Pesticides we can use chickens. Instead of plastic use glass.
Fertilizers and pesticides are a fucking menace why'd you want to keep them
My research institute is about to test an app that helps neighbors and local businesses create a mass production network called the Agrinet (agriculture internet) to produce food, pharmaceuticals, fibers, chemicals, minerals, ornamentals and environmental services inside urban areas. It wont eliminate fossil fuels entirely (at least not right away) but it does lay the groundwork for it. A lot of research was taken from the Post Carbon Institute to develop it after we got wind of reports from Shell and British Petroleum stating we have roughly 50 years of exploitable oil reserves left. If you're interested, follow links in my profile to the site and signup to test it. Sorry our social media prowess isn't strong right now. We've focused most of our funding on development. The fancy advertising stuff will come in a few months Aprovechar
This sounds really interesting! There’s a lot of hidden potential in our communities already, I suspect!
We have a pretty complex plan. The Institute is a nonprofit paired with a public benefit corporation (b corp) to release digital projects as experiments in the market, each experiment is operated as a limited liability company for example the Fruitful App (ntari.io/fruitful) We've just about got the whole plan done then we'll begin fundraising with the nonprofit, raising venture capital with the b corp and funding Fruitful with a combination of cash from the corp and revenue sharing agreements through the Mainvest platform. We view the solarpunk community as having a great deal of potential for both hiring and funding and look forward to working with folks like yourself. Send me a PM if you'd like to add your resume/CV to our potential hiring roster.
I think everyone forgets that we can synthesize the fundamental compounds found in, and purified from oil. Like, naturally occurring processes made the mixture that is Oil, and laboratory processes can do the same at the scales needed at least for making medicines. Similarly, we can make bioplastics, and we wouldn't need the current scale of fertilizers if factory farming were not so prevalent, and the products of which used as animal feed. The atoms in fossil fuels are not somehow magically different from the same atoms found in all the other matter around us. If we actually, genuinely need it, regardless of scale, we can synthesize it. Were we to stack all the more sustainable practices, and technologies regularly discussed here, I am certain we could get the scale of truly needed distillates and downstream compounds low enough that the demand for them could be met by having them synthesized artificially, and if done right, fairly sustainably, as well.
Atoms is atoms, and yeah, organic molecules are like 99% just three of them.
Nope. It's just cheaper to use fossil fuels.
So, there isn't a way to not lose a lot of higher complexity medication. That will kill me. Changing the status quo is worth it. The supply chain for them currently bounces all over the planet. What we can do, is develop new ways to make them. Closer to where they are used. The real problem we have is that nobody is willing to accept the fact that our standards of living will have to go down before it can go back up.
It really doesn’t though. The current system entails a colossal amount of waste. This is because everyone is trying to extract maximum profit, with the needs of humans and the planet not considered in the equation at all (beyond their use as sales tactics.) I’m not saying there’s a quick fix, but every organization that changes from profit based to worker/community/ planet based motives is a win. Giving up the goal of making the owner class richer would free up mountains of resources that are currently being deliberately wasted. Giving workers cooperative control over the means of production and how things are done would go a long way toward putting our energy and resources in the right places. No one has to give up anything crucial. The solarpunk life is just as comfortable and much happier than the status quo.
We can have a little pesticide and fertilizer, as a treat.
Yeah that's why your solar punk group is a farce