Some great soul said something like "God has given everything to meet your need, not your greed". As long as the greed continues to increase exponentially, no amount of innovation is going to support it.
The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on.
Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
This is why I'm somewhat apathetic about the current price increases in tech and oil. We just consume such insane amounts of resources unnecessarily. We throw old tech in the junk drawer because the latest model came out, drive tanks to the supermarket, and buy endless amounts of junk clothing that ends up in landfill.
At least in developed countries I feel like most consumption could stop and daily life wouldn't be any worse off.
A lot of consumption is social signalling, sending the message "look! I can afford this!"
Maybe we should recast frugality as "financial edging". Think about buying something but refrain so that when you do finally give in the rush is enhanced.
Once you have got yours this is fine - like people who own big houses and are somewhat apathetic about house prices going up by multiples over a few years.
People who dont have computers should simply cancel their expensive netflix subscription and not eat avocados on toast. Within 5-7 years they too will have saved up enough for a deposit on an entry level GPU and some RAM.
I was going to add a disclaimer about the comment referring to the average person likely to read this website and not someone who does not own a computer at all. I would happily vote for taxes on upper incomes including my own go up if it is needed to help people at the bottom afford the essentials.
Personally my gaming pc is from 2019 which by industry standards is bordering on obsolete junk. But compared to the game consoles I was playing not that long ago this thing has virtually infinite power and should be expected to last far longer than it currently is.
The old tech thing is maddening. In no small part that is consumerism pure and simple, but there's also ridiculous planned obsolescence at play.
My cellphone is inching towards 5 years, and it is perfectly serviceable. I could likely keep using it for years more. I am having to look at a replacement in the near future because there will be mo more updates for it.
And for computers, most people could probably make do with machines that are many years old and not feel a difference in their capabilities.
The other day I took out my old Nintendo ds and started playing some games. I was surprised how fun it still is today, then I looked up the hardware specs. This thing has 4MB of ram, FOUR megabytes. And yet developers fit a full size game on it.
Now I have 32 gigabytes of ram and games still sometimes run terribly. Which highlights the point that consumption is limitless. If I had 4 terabytes of ram devs would just build the game in node and never free memory just because they don’t have to.
> And for computers, most people could probably make do with machines that are many years old and not feel a difference in their capabilities.
That would be true if not for 50MB-heavy JavaScript webpages.
Same goes for smartphone apps. Facebook app used to be a few megabytes in size and it was already very big compared to other apps you had on the phone.
I bought a refurbished Thinkpad from 2021 to be my daily driver. 32GB RAM. Paid a few hundred bucks for it. I didn't do it for environmental purposes, I just figured that the specs were more than good enough for general use and software development. Has the added benefit of not becoming e-waste.
Works like a charm, does everything I need, just not very good for more demanding games due to lack of a dedicated GPU.
A fairly basic economic principle is that demand is infinite. It's a derived concept from the fact that demand is driven by desire- both need and want. The less personal sacrifice required to get something, the more people will want it.
It's far from an axiomatic truth, but it's a good enough approximation to point out that "Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people" is an absurd bogeyman here. If it wasn't, everyone would be living in shoebox apartments, would never travel outside their neighborhood in their mega city, and our diets would consist of the least possible energy intensive foods possible- probably a soylent style powder that is shelf stable and doesn't require a great deal of refrigeration or preserving.
We don't live like that because people don't really see how taking a 5 minute car ride round trip to the grocery store instead of a 40 minute bus ride round trip is worse for the environment, and we keep living in our individual houses because we don't like apartments, and so on and so forth. Properly insulating those buildings requires polymers for things like weather sheathing, plus insulation for electrical cabling, and so forth. All of these little inefficiencies and uses for polymers add up to the simple truth: we're not going to hit CO2 reduction goals on the basis of individual action, and we're not going to stop using plastics.
I lived in the Netherlands for a bit, where I used to do a bike ride to the grocery shop.
Now I live in a more car-centric place where the only practical way to do grocery shopping is by car (unless I am to walk back to my house looking like a pack mule). I am not brave enough to ride a bike on the road.
If I were to choose, I vastly prefer the bike (not even for environmental concerns, it was just more pleasant). But things just aren't built that way.
It's generally easier to envision a small amount of changes at once. But for something like walkable or bike or public centric transportation, multiple things need to change before it makes sense.
Ie with a car, you go to grocery store once a week. You buy lots of things.
If you live close to a store in the city, you can just pick up something while coming home, or even when you're cooking you can just run to the store in 2 minutes to get something on-demand.
But you can't gradually go from one to the other so easily. You can't go with car to the local small store. There's nowhere to park etc. You can't go to the big box store in the middle of cooking because it takes an hour for the round trip.
So if you have person doing A, they see B as impractical "where would I park?". Or person B would say A is impractical because "I'd have to know cooking a week in advance". Both arguments are correct, you can't go from A to B or B to A by just changing one thing. You need a whole new big picture.
You can still do a mix sometimes, ie a person can do both, but not in the same situations.
Walking distance covers a large range. There is a big difference from a place you are walking by anyway, and a place you can walk to but normally don't. I can walk to my local grocery store - it is only about half an hour: about as far as a normal person would walk to work. There is nothing else along that trip that I would go to regularly which means that grocery shopping by walking would cost me an extra hour of my life every trip - in turn meaning I'm going to buy as much as I can. Anybody with a family will be buying more than they can realistically get in a cart (assuming any hills or rough terrain)
A suburban grocery store is rarely much closer - even though there is typically houses behind them, there is a fence in between so you can't get there from those houses.
If the grocery store was on my way home from work that would be different: I can stop in to grab just enough for today's meal (and breakfast tomorrow). However on the way needs to be fairly strict. A suburban grocery store has the doors too far away from anyplace somebody would walk to be considered on the way - the additional to my trip is going to be annoying enough that I'm going to be getting more stuff when I do make that trip in turn meaning I won't use it.
The above assumes a pure walking trip. I used to take the bus to work. The bus stopped at a transfer point in front of a grocery store, the bus only ran every half an hour so I never got off for my shopping: it didn't work for a 5 minutes get what I need for today trip as the bus would be gone (5 minutes assumes I know exactly where the one thing I need is and that the line to checkout isn't long). I'd either have to waste 20 minutes, or I'd get so much stuff it can't fit on the bus - also there is risk of a long line making me miss the next bus.
For most suburbs there is enough density that good bus service such that you would get rid of a car and that would save money after paying for the bus service. However to get there means spending a large pile of money for a few years while people who have cars slowly figure out they don't need them all anymore.
Most people in the suburbs live in some form of family situation where the household has more than one car. I'm asking them to get rid of one of those cars to pay for the bus service, not all of them which stops most of their objection since very few of them do two different trips at once where they would both need a car (the whole family is going to the farm for Christmas in one car).
> Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
That buys into propaganda from businesses who don't want those responsibilities. ESG (and DEI) were widely embraced by businesses; they groups of humans and humans generally have empahy and care.
This is an important comment, thank you. Most people know this half consciously but because it's been so pervasive their entire lives it never really hits. Until people wake up to this fully and snap out of whatever trance they are in, we will continue down this destructive path.
Adding to what you said, there is also a sudden scarcity that is partially real and caused by an oligarchy that took over in different places and caused world level problems and partially a fake scarcity done by extreme demand and intentional smaller production levels.
I vaguely recall reading that biofuels have been debunked as being insanely inefficient as a fuel source and consume land that would be better used to grow food.
40% of US corn goes to biofuel (ethanol), contributing less than 4% of US fuel supply. With soybean oil it's even worse, 40% contributes 1%. Converting all farmland currently used for biofuel production globally to solar would produce 23x as much energy, enough to electrify the entire global (automotive) vehicle fleet.
I'm not familiar with how much feedstock is required to produce bioplastics, but it looks like plastics production globally is, I believe, around 500 million (metric) tons -- ie 500 billion kilograms, vs roughly 120 billion liters of biofuel. Napkin math at 1 kg/L (the density of ethanol is about 0.8 kg/l, so that's close), and that's about 4x more required, assuming no wastage by mass.
In other words, you're right to be skeptical; I don't think the math works.
Methanol and methane produced via DAC has been proposed as an alternative, but will only be feasible economically with extremely low energy costs. Possible with high solar penetration (see Australia), but far from a settled political question.
Bingo. There have been studies on the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) on corn ethanol, and while results vary somewhat, the consensus seems to be that while the EROEI is positive, it's barely so. Maybe around 1.2-1.5, I don't recall, been a while since I looked into it. That is, to get around 1.5 units of energy in the form of corn ethanol, you'll need 1 unit of energy embodied in fertilizer, diesel fuel for agricultural machinery, natural gas for the distillation etc.
If your heart too loves the sight of vast fields, (my clanker computed) converting all of it to solar meets 4–5× total U.S. electricity generation, agrivoltaics look nicer and can generate 3× U.S. electricity.
Biofuels are basically green washing. While sugar-based is better than corn-based, Brazilian biofuel is mostly just turning EU subsidies into profit, by converting petrol into sugar-based biofuel to burn instead of burning the petrol directly. Very unfortunate.
> converting petrol into sugar-based biofuel to burn instead of burning the petrol directly
The obvious question here seems to me to be, what if they just burned their own biofuel? How much would that increase the cost/price?
At least some of these operations have to be running at some kind of net gain. It's really about price in the end. I've heard breaking down switchgrass in giant vats with microbes is going pretty well.
Eventually at some future point, we will need large scale biofuels at least for jet fuel. Because however long we might draw it out, we will run out of oil (better yet, we choose to stop using it, but, you know). The market will pay whatever it takes. The problem right now is that this seems so far off in the future and so impossible to 'time' that markets don't care yet.
You are right about it being strictly nonsense from a pure economics point of view. But in Brazil at least the economics of biofuel are not so far apart that they don't offset the advantages in more local industry and self-reliance against an increasingly unstable global oil market and geopolitical pressures (both of which are much harder to quantify).
However ethanol simply can't be used for heavy duty trucks and ships (which, you know, is 95% or more of goods transports in Brazil since there is almost no rail) which defeats much of the point.
At least the general population can shift to ethanol when supply market gets crazy which helps amortize the whole supply chain, but it still ends up affecting everyone just to a slightly lesser degree.
Buy yeah, corn or soy based ethanol is just insane to do at all. Sugar-based only makes sense in an increasingly unstable global order.
The main focus of the article is not biofuels, but plant based plastics. We can replace most of the need for fuel with EV (or hydrogen fuels), but plastic is a harder problem. Micro and nanoplastics are also a problem that urgently needs to be addressed.
> Micro and nanoplastics are also a problem that urgently needs to be addressed.
Bio-plastics won't do this automatically. You can make today's polymers from biomass feedstock. Those will have the exact same micro/nano plastic problems.
You can also make polymeres, that are much more bio-degradable, with the associated particulate matter decaying instead of accumulating forever - but you could make those from crude oil just as well, and those degradable polymeres bring an entirely different zoo of problems with them.
This article tosses together bio fuels and plastics. By conflating the two, they seem to try to create some urgency for subsidizing the creation of both. And of course bio fuels are heavily subsidized already.
This article deliberately confuses things by conflating it with the discussion around bio fuels. Which, as you point out is largely redundant given that we now have decent EVs for literally anything with wheels commercially available. Anything from the tiniest scooters to the largest vehicles operated in the mining industry. And everything in between.
The fallacy with this debate is the focus on disproportionately small parts of the challenge of de-carbonization. If we manage to electrify most road and rail transport, heating (industrial and domestic), some shipping and aviation, etc. that would make an enormous dent in fossil fuel usage. After that we might focus on harder things like plastics. I'm not against people focusing on that now. More power to these people. But put it in perspective: it's relatively small part of the problem. And we have alternatives.
This fallacy is a recurring theme in fossil fuel lobbying materials. By spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, they hope to slow down the accelerating implosion of their primary revenue maker: fuel sales. So, they talk up hydrogen and bio fuels. Sponsor studies on the impact of windmills on wild life. Etc. I can't help but look at this article and wonder who payed for it.
There is nothing to debunk. Countries that heavily rely on biofuels did it to fight trade pressures. Brazil is the posterboy.
We KNOW it is inefficient. It's why anywhere someone who has the capital and has a brain, is swapping out cornfields for solar panels to make more money. Problem is the first setup of a corn field when you don't have that capital is cheaper due to subsidies.
America does those subsidies too. You guys voted for it, of course!
I recently learned that nylon 11 (sometimes aka PA11) is made from castor oil, which (I also learned) is just the vegetable oil extracted from the castor bean.
Castor beans also contain high levels of the toxin ricin. As few as 5 castor beans, if chewed or mashed, can be dangerous for a human. The oil contains relatively little since it's a water-soluable toxin, but the leftover "oil cake" from manufacturing is pretty toxic and when used as fertilizer it's been accidentally eaten by animals.
Interesting overview. I’m curious how these plant-based replacements hold up on durability and moisture resistance long-term vs petroleum plastics, especially for packaging and outdoor use.
The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on.
Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
At least in developed countries I feel like most consumption could stop and daily life wouldn't be any worse off.
Maybe we should recast frugality as "financial edging". Think about buying something but refrain so that when you do finally give in the rush is enhanced.
People who dont have computers should simply cancel their expensive netflix subscription and not eat avocados on toast. Within 5-7 years they too will have saved up enough for a deposit on an entry level GPU and some RAM.
Personally my gaming pc is from 2019 which by industry standards is bordering on obsolete junk. But compared to the game consoles I was playing not that long ago this thing has virtually infinite power and should be expected to last far longer than it currently is.
My cellphone is inching towards 5 years, and it is perfectly serviceable. I could likely keep using it for years more. I am having to look at a replacement in the near future because there will be mo more updates for it.
And for computers, most people could probably make do with machines that are many years old and not feel a difference in their capabilities.
Now I have 32 gigabytes of ram and games still sometimes run terribly. Which highlights the point that consumption is limitless. If I had 4 terabytes of ram devs would just build the game in node and never free memory just because they don’t have to.
That would be true if not for 50MB-heavy JavaScript webpages.
Same goes for smartphone apps. Facebook app used to be a few megabytes in size and it was already very big compared to other apps you had on the phone.
Works like a charm, does everything I need, just not very good for more demanding games due to lack of a dedicated GPU.
It's far from an axiomatic truth, but it's a good enough approximation to point out that "Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people" is an absurd bogeyman here. If it wasn't, everyone would be living in shoebox apartments, would never travel outside their neighborhood in their mega city, and our diets would consist of the least possible energy intensive foods possible- probably a soylent style powder that is shelf stable and doesn't require a great deal of refrigeration or preserving.
We don't live like that because people don't really see how taking a 5 minute car ride round trip to the grocery store instead of a 40 minute bus ride round trip is worse for the environment, and we keep living in our individual houses because we don't like apartments, and so on and so forth. Properly insulating those buildings requires polymers for things like weather sheathing, plus insulation for electrical cabling, and so forth. All of these little inefficiencies and uses for polymers add up to the simple truth: we're not going to hit CO2 reduction goals on the basis of individual action, and we're not going to stop using plastics.
Now I live in a more car-centric place where the only practical way to do grocery shopping is by car (unless I am to walk back to my house looking like a pack mule). I am not brave enough to ride a bike on the road.
If I were to choose, I vastly prefer the bike (not even for environmental concerns, it was just more pleasant). But things just aren't built that way.
Granny carts of various sizes and shapes are available. Super useful when one does not want to use a car.
You mentioned that you don't ride a bike, but for those who do, trailers are also available, as are cargo bikes.
A lot was lost when we started to design our neighborhoods around the assumption that everybody gets around by car.
Ie with a car, you go to grocery store once a week. You buy lots of things.
If you live close to a store in the city, you can just pick up something while coming home, or even when you're cooking you can just run to the store in 2 minutes to get something on-demand.
But you can't gradually go from one to the other so easily. You can't go with car to the local small store. There's nowhere to park etc. You can't go to the big box store in the middle of cooking because it takes an hour for the round trip.
So if you have person doing A, they see B as impractical "where would I park?". Or person B would say A is impractical because "I'd have to know cooking a week in advance". Both arguments are correct, you can't go from A to B or B to A by just changing one thing. You need a whole new big picture.
You can still do a mix sometimes, ie a person can do both, but not in the same situations.
A suburban grocery store is rarely much closer - even though there is typically houses behind them, there is a fence in between so you can't get there from those houses.
If the grocery store was on my way home from work that would be different: I can stop in to grab just enough for today's meal (and breakfast tomorrow). However on the way needs to be fairly strict. A suburban grocery store has the doors too far away from anyplace somebody would walk to be considered on the way - the additional to my trip is going to be annoying enough that I'm going to be getting more stuff when I do make that trip in turn meaning I won't use it.
The above assumes a pure walking trip. I used to take the bus to work. The bus stopped at a transfer point in front of a grocery store, the bus only ran every half an hour so I never got off for my shopping: it didn't work for a 5 minutes get what I need for today trip as the bus would be gone (5 minutes assumes I know exactly where the one thing I need is and that the line to checkout isn't long). I'd either have to waste 20 minutes, or I'd get so much stuff it can't fit on the bus - also there is risk of a long line making me miss the next bus.
1.) I walk to a shop cause that is the easiest way to get there.
2.) If the difference bwtween a car and bus trip is 5 vs 40 min, the bus system majorely sux.
Basically, you described situation where people settled at bad uncomfortable setup and consider it "good enough" for tradition reasons.
Most people in the suburbs live in some form of family situation where the household has more than one car. I'm asking them to get rid of one of those cars to pay for the bus service, not all of them which stops most of their objection since very few of them do two different trips at once where they would both need a car (the whole family is going to the farm for Christmas in one car).
That buys into propaganda from businesses who don't want those responsibilities. ESG (and DEI) were widely embraced by businesses; they groups of humans and humans generally have empahy and care.
Maybe Marx was on to something after all...
I'm not familiar with how much feedstock is required to produce bioplastics, but it looks like plastics production globally is, I believe, around 500 million (metric) tons -- ie 500 billion kilograms, vs roughly 120 billion liters of biofuel. Napkin math at 1 kg/L (the density of ethanol is about 0.8 kg/l, so that's close), and that's about 4x more required, assuming no wastage by mass.
In other words, you're right to be skeptical; I don't think the math works.
Methanol and methane produced via DAC has been proposed as an alternative, but will only be feasible economically with extremely low energy costs. Possible with high solar penetration (see Australia), but far from a settled political question.
https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-im...
https://ourworldindata.org/biofuel-land-solar-electric-vehic...
https://agrivoltaics.rutgers.edu/image-gallery-of-agrivoltai...
The obvious question here seems to me to be, what if they just burned their own biofuel? How much would that increase the cost/price?
At least some of these operations have to be running at some kind of net gain. It's really about price in the end. I've heard breaking down switchgrass in giant vats with microbes is going pretty well.
Eventually at some future point, we will need large scale biofuels at least for jet fuel. Because however long we might draw it out, we will run out of oil (better yet, we choose to stop using it, but, you know). The market will pay whatever it takes. The problem right now is that this seems so far off in the future and so impossible to 'time' that markets don't care yet.
However ethanol simply can't be used for heavy duty trucks and ships (which, you know, is 95% or more of goods transports in Brazil since there is almost no rail) which defeats much of the point.
At least the general population can shift to ethanol when supply market gets crazy which helps amortize the whole supply chain, but it still ends up affecting everyone just to a slightly lesser degree.
Buy yeah, corn or soy based ethanol is just insane to do at all. Sugar-based only makes sense in an increasingly unstable global order.
Bio-plastics won't do this automatically. You can make today's polymers from biomass feedstock. Those will have the exact same micro/nano plastic problems.
You can also make polymeres, that are much more bio-degradable, with the associated particulate matter decaying instead of accumulating forever - but you could make those from crude oil just as well, and those degradable polymeres bring an entirely different zoo of problems with them.
This article deliberately confuses things by conflating it with the discussion around bio fuels. Which, as you point out is largely redundant given that we now have decent EVs for literally anything with wheels commercially available. Anything from the tiniest scooters to the largest vehicles operated in the mining industry. And everything in between.
The fallacy with this debate is the focus on disproportionately small parts of the challenge of de-carbonization. If we manage to electrify most road and rail transport, heating (industrial and domestic), some shipping and aviation, etc. that would make an enormous dent in fossil fuel usage. After that we might focus on harder things like plastics. I'm not against people focusing on that now. More power to these people. But put it in perspective: it's relatively small part of the problem. And we have alternatives.
This fallacy is a recurring theme in fossil fuel lobbying materials. By spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt, they hope to slow down the accelerating implosion of their primary revenue maker: fuel sales. So, they talk up hydrogen and bio fuels. Sponsor studies on the impact of windmills on wild life. Etc. I can't help but look at this article and wonder who payed for it.
We KNOW it is inefficient. It's why anywhere someone who has the capital and has a brain, is swapping out cornfields for solar panels to make more money. Problem is the first setup of a corn field when you don't have that capital is cheaper due to subsidies.
America does those subsidies too. You guys voted for it, of course!