How would you cope with food prices rising 10x in cost ? And the famines ? And the breakdown of law and order accompanied with the failure of most industry and the military. ? Please propose a solution along with your oil-ban utopia.
Why would food costs increase 10x? It’s not particularly hard to make ammonia fertilizer with renewables. Ammonia is made using hydrogen already (not fossil fuels directly, as is mistakenly believed by many), it’s just that usually that comes from natural gas. The price of ammonia might increase a bit in the near term as we make it with clean hydrogen, but it wouldn’t increase food prices 10x. Secondly, electric tractors are a thing and that wouldn’t be too hard, either (and you can use ammonia as fuel for more traditional combine and tractor engines if you want).
EDIT: John Deere has done some interesting work with electrified tractors and other farm implements, including finding ways to avoid using a battery (with an autonomous tractor using a cable): https://www.futurefarming.com/Machinery/Articles/2020/3/John...
You absolutely don’t need oil to make that. In fact usually it’s made with natural gas. But it’s easy to make hydrogen using water and renewable electricity. That’s what fuels almost all hydrogen vehicles.
The university of Minnesota has had a pilot plant for wind to ammonia for over a decade now.
AFAIK China is the world's largest producer of Ammonia (32%. on checking wikipedia).
"Most of the ammonia is still coal-fed. China currently accounts for 95% of global ammonia capacity based
on coal feedstock. In view of China’s ample coal reserves, coal gasification technologies have been further developed and are now used extensively. Coal-based ammonia capacity represents 86% of total Chinese ammonia capacity"
I don't understand how your interesting info about China making Hydrogen from gas (that it makes from coal) supports your point that you need oil to make hydrogen and so if you ban oil (which I don't particularly think we need to do) civilization and specifically farming would collapse? Isn't that a bit melodramatic as well as wrong?
Green Hydrogen (made from water via electrolysis powered by renewable energy) is the generally accepted solution. You can find EU plans, or various corporate plans to move entirely to that over the coming decades.
There's some discussion about whether the fossil fuel suppliers are funding propaganda to encourage this move and intend to secretly just use fossil sources and release the carbon anyway, but one limit on this dastardly scheme is that renewable created hydrogen will soon be cheaper anyway, and before that governments and corporations can insist on certificates that reflect the chain of custody of the products.
It’s not that secret. fossil fuel companies are pushing “blue hydrogen” (ie regular fossil fuel produced hydrogen plus carbon capture) pretty aggressively. Of course, you can just not do the carbon capture step to save cost, and boom, you’re still using fossil fuels with climate impact just as bad as before.
Anyway, green hydrogen is good, and while it won’t ever be as cheap for vehicles as electrification (and the vehicle costs are higher for fuel cell vehicles, too), it is important for industrial uses of hydrogen, like iron ore reduction to metal and ammonia fertilizer.
There was a time in the 2000s when natural gas based hydrogen was about $2.50/kg. I think we can get green hydrogen down to that level at large scale. Biggest question is really the electrolyzer capital cost as renewable electricity is already cheap enough.
There was even a book authored on this "Eating Oil: Energy Use In Food Production" in that era that showed how reliant agriculture is on oil and how close the first world was to food crisis.
But there wasn’t a food crisis. So if I understand you correctly, the economy is resilient enough for a sudden, externally imposed oil shortage, but if we decide it ourselves and give us a few years to prepare, the economy, and indeed society, will collapse?
I find such "pragmatic" viewpoints on climate action quite amusing as in defining what is or isn't feasible, they take social and political aspects as hard constraints but nature forces as negotiable.
How will cargo ships run without heavy fuel oil ? They are responsible for global trade and keep world-economy and industry running. (Well one solution is nuclear...)
Huh. I thought this was a joke (moving a 100k tonne cargo ship via sail), but apparently there are actually some prototypes. Though its more like Sail assistance than pure sail.
But nobody's actually talking about a 100% ban. They're talking about incentives so that people choose an electric car when they buy a new one. And some higher taxes on the use of fossil fuels. And maybe eventually banning new fossil fuel-powered passenger vehicles.
If it's anything like Australia, the agricultural industry would be exempt from such taxes. And presumably countries won't tax their own militaries.
Whether that's sufficient, I don't know. But it seems like a multilateral agreement, including the US, on both supply and demand side, is the most likely to happen and also have a substantial impact.
A sub-25 reduction over several decades might be doable. But we will need to invent brand-new industrial processes and change world-wide practices. Because modern Agricultural Industry is deeply tied to Oil today and that dependence is barely reducing.
We’re already reducing significantly per capita, without the desastrous consequences you decry. Oil consumption is essentially stagnant in the US since 2000 (1) while the population has grown by 50,000,000 (2), i.e. by ~17.8%
