- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
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Burn oil to pump oil
Burn oil to refine oil
Burn oil to ship oil
So we can burn oil at home.
cook oil to make plastic/chemicals
dump plastic/chemicals in the ocean
I read recently that they found bacteria in the ocean that’s actually metabolizing some (PET) plastics, so that’s kind of interesting. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251104013023.htm
Internal Combustion Engine age.
Not to mention that would drastically reduce dirty ocean water and countries can begin to clean up their coastlines.
Not to mention all the fossil fuel used to build the ships in the first place.
There’s a lot of fossil fuel burned before that steel arrives at the shipyard.
“We need the fossil fuels to get more fossil fuels to move the fossil fuels just to take the fossil-fuel thing to the fossil fuel store to get more fossil fuels!” -people that sell fossil fuels
It’s the rocket ship problem.
You need fuel to move the fuel that moves the fuel that moves the rocket
Sure, but when a lot of the things don’t need to carry the fuel with them and induction roadways do it all in the moment?
induction roadways
Do you mean railways?
No.
Here, let me DDG two words for you: https://www.enrx.com/en/Induction-Applications/Inductive-charging-and-power-applications/Dynamic-electric-roadway
And one day we even become fossil fuel…
We don’t, we decompose. Fossil fuels are basically plants that died and were subsumed millions of years before bacteria and fungi evolved to decompose them.That doesn’t happen anymore.
… it’s people!!
China burns coal to produce them, so there’s no shipping since they have coal.
Wake me when China invades a country because they have coal.
Ya, they dont give a shit about the environment. Hence why we produce all our goods there, as we theoretically self flagellate ourselves for climate change.
China is actually one of the very few countries meeting its commitments so far. They’re even a bit ahead of schedule: renewable and nuclear power plants, fleet electrification (cars and trucks, plus advanced railways), planting large forests, etc.
Granted that won’t be sufficient, they should do more and faster, and they now see coming issues with the degradation of their soils and their water resources. But during that same time period, western countries rolled back environment policies and came back on their promises, going further and further away from adverting a catastrophe.
Please always provide a source.
The actual statistic is from here I think.
Looks like a screenshot of www.marinetraffic.com - red ships are tankers.
Also, there would be less wars in the Middle East.
Look, you’re not thinking about the shareholders. I NEED YOU to think about the shareholders! How will they ever make their billions? You selfish bastard!
/s just in case.
THR GODDAMN ENERGY FALLS FROM THE SKY FOR FREE!!!
Yes, but you can’t resell it for a profit elsewhere easily. You want us to switch to sky energy, we need a way to make the output portable so someone can make money on it. I really hate capitalism and hope this is the fall at a global level. Though if anyone was watching, China has been making the right moves towards solar and transport. If they stop oppressing their people i’ll move all my soon to be worthless USD to YUAN.
I laughed.
But if you want to do anything with it other than heat something up, you need to build a contraption. And, we’ve only recently become good at building those contraptions.
In the US, we use a lot of prime farmland to grow corn that we turn into ethanol - 30,000,000 acres. Thirty million acres!
That ethanol is combined with gas (making the gas less efficient, by the way) and powers our cars in the US.
If you look at the number of miles the ethanol powers in the US, and calculate how many acres of solar we’d need to power electric cars to go that number of miles, we’d need to convert less than a quarter of a million of those acres to solar. So let’s round up from 214,000 acres to the 250,000 because… inefficiencies, or whatever.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
For that matter, if we wanted to use that ethanol land (JUST the land we’re using for ethanol) to power ALL cars in the US, switching everyone over to electric, it would only take about two million acres. Sure, 2,000,000 acres is a lot, but that would still be freeing up TWENTY EIGHT MILLION ACRES of land we’re using JUST to grow corn we turn into ethanol.
It does ignore anything like the chaos of forcing everyone to buy a new electric car, setting that infrastructure up - I’m not saying this would be easy, but it is stunning how much land we could stop abusing to grow corn to burn in our cars.
Mandating solar PV in all building codes nationwide, and incentivizing onshoring of all of the processes that go into manufacturing solar PV panels (including using trade protectionism practices such as tariffs AFTER WE ALREADY HAVE PROCESSING AND MANUFACTURING CAPABILITIES IN THE USA) will do wonders for helping average people transition away from fossil fuel Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars to EVs.
Many people who cry foul about EVs and renewables adding too much load to a grid that is too old and just can’t handle it forget the main counter to disarm their arguments: colocating generation with utilization.
Having solar PV (and other renewable) generation closest to where that power wants to be used is the best for the grid infrastructure (maybe not the grid investors) because it reduces residential/commercial load while maintaining the needs of the original giga users of the grid: Industry.
There are solutions to SO many of today’s problems. We just have politicians that are bought and sold by billionaires and their corporations who won’t do the public’s bidding. Voting progressive politicians in, and preferably ones who vocally claim they’re Democratic Socialist or similar, is the strongest way we push back against Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Tech, and all the other mega industries.
So we could gain 29,750,000 acres of land to grow more food or whatever and stop growing corn to turn into ethanol just to burn it in our cars.
What if there is another potato famine, (added: another potato destroying mold)? That corn creates food security because it can always be used as food while the ethanol is replaced with petrol.
Corn grown for ethanol is not edible by humans. Also, do you really think growing only 29,750,000 acres of corn instead of 30,000,000 acres is a meaningful difference? Because it’s not.
You suggest to grown none of those 30 million that are used for ethanol. That would be 30 million acres less out of 90 million that are used for corn. That’s a major chamge.
Corn grown for ethanol would not help in a food shortage, so for the idea of a food shortage, it is… not helpful.
We have plenty of land not being used right now that could be used to grow food.
But we don’t have a shortage of food. We have food being wasted and thrown away. We have plenty of excess food. This is like being worried about your driveway taking up valuable lawn space. It’s… not.
would not help in a food shortage
Others have pointed out that it can be eaten as staple food.
We have plenty of land not being used right now
Land doesn’t help if there is no food.
But we don’t have a shortage of food.
A reserve is for out of ordinary situations.
You know the Irish wouldn’t have starved so bad if the Brits didn’t insist they export all food that wasn’t potatoes. Let’s not use bad policies as an example for why we can’t have good policies.
I meant to say that the problem could be another potato destroing mold. The famine could be avoided by switching to ethanol corn.
Not growing that corn would lead to the same result as exporting it.
If what you say is accurate, the other benefit would be that they wouldn’t even need prime, fertile real estate.
They’d just need any space with good sun capture.
Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.
Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.
Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.
More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields
If this is true then solar dominance would be very efficient for our society in your’s and op’s description because in this scenario, corn will still always be grown… however, it would be marginalized to its regions that can only grow corn as you described.
I think that’s what you was coveying.
Are you just restating the numbers from the Technology Connections video? Or have you verified any of this research yourself?
I do watch Alec, but this came from my own - informal - work.
In the US, we use a lot of prime farmland to grow corn that we turn into ethanol - 30,000,000 acres. Thirty million acres!
not actually true. This is oil and gas propaganda.
Most of the corn grown in the US is not edible. Barely 1.5%. Most of it is grown for sugars, oils and other industrial processes.
Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn’t sweet corn, and doesn’t taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.
And calling opposition to ethanol “oil and gas propaganda” is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.
did you read the whole comment? alexander already stated that
Most of the corn grown in the US is not edible. Barely 1.5%. Most of it is grown for sugars, oils and other industrial processes.
not actually true. This is oil and sugar propaganda.
Most of the corn grown in the US is grass. 100% of it, in fact. Soybeans make up a large percentage of animal feed.
Most of the corn grown in the US is grass.
…grass? you mean feed?
or do you mean maise technically being a grass, but having diverged greatly from it’s original form via agricultural selection?
if that’s the case, when you say most, what’s the remainder then?
I was just posting nonsense in response to the commenter who didn’t read what they were responding to. But yeah, I did mean it in the sense that it is highly artificially selected grass. Most being all, the remainder being none
ty for the explanation
…and that would drop the amount of marine fuel needed. Compound interest.
which means we need to transport less fuel around, so less ships
And more unemployed seamen’s.
They can install solar panels or wire or something and not have to be away from their family for months at a time. Also the vast majority of seamen shipping oil are coerced captive workers from impoverished places with confiscated passports and no rights. Employed isn’t really the right word to use.
And more unemployed wharf whores.
Doesn’t anyone think about wharf whores!
Seaman certainly do.
I’m trying to pronounce the h’s here like Stewie Griffin.
Who whants a wharf whore with cool whip?
Sounds like a delectable combination.
seamen’s
What kind of abomination is this?
i found them in my little brother’s sock
I prefer my semen unemployed, thank you.
Employ them as the crew of an interplanetary solar sail expedition. We’ll be colonizing the moons of Jupiter in no time!
Just put some money into advanced sailing ship tech and in a decade we’ll have advanced clippers with many more seamen needed.
So overseas shipping rates drop and some of the companies convert their ships to give joy-rides in seas (because cheaper sea travel), while some seamen get to explore avenues like deep sea exploration (which seems to be a really underdeveloped field) and development.
Somehow I’m not seeing your average deck hand transitioning into deep sea exploration.
Well, the average deck hand can stay working at the normal ships that are shipping other stuff.
The above average ones can become a deck hand for the newer vehicles for deep sea operations.Both are probably already paid low enough that corporate can easily pay them while reducing shipping rates at the same time.
I’m thinking the deep sea exploration pays a bit more than a guy who can hook some cables on a crate.
But wtf do I know…
But of course, if the extra exploration rate can be afforded, then so can their salaries.
The only thing that matters is whether there will be someone wanting to do so.
Guy doing marine fuel enters the chat.
Less, now that we shut down the Straight of Hormuz
At this point I’m starting to believe that we could replace all engines with hamster wheels with actual hamsters and it would be more efficient.
