Opening line of the linked paper:

"Modern medicine relies on petroleum, particularly to transport patients, staff, and supplies"

That part is largely 'solved' problem and the rollout of those solutions over the next 30 years will probably be significant. As far as plastics and pharmaceuticals are concerned the paper puts it at "an estimated 0.2% of petroleum used in the United States was for medical plastics"

As for plastics in general the current number seems to be in the 6-10% range globally depending on who you ask. With a combination of reducing, recycling and misc. technology improvements I'm sure we can get that down further in the next 20-30 years. And much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.

So on the whole I think winding down the petroleum industry as we know it today over the next 30 years to a fraction of what it is today (no one is seriously suggesting 100% shutdown) is absolutely doable, from a technology point of view. The reasons why it won't happen are political.

> and much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.

More importantly, it will hopefully come from onshore wells which are easier to access and manage than the crazy underwater shenanigans necessary of deep offshore extraction.

Not to mention that there have been research into making bioplastics[0]. Though they currently aren't as good as petroleum plastics, a push for more research and using blends can significantly reduce that dependence even more. Every step forward is still movement forward. Yes, we should be moving faster, but moving forward is better than not moving at all (or moving backwards). At the end of the day we won't be able to stop all CO2 production, but we should be able to achieve sustainable levels.

People often forget that the problem isn't producing CO2, the problem is producing too much CO2. If we have sequestration techniques (natural or man made) you can produce as much CO2 as you want as long as you have sustainable levels (which currently we need negative net production).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic

Yes, pretty much every educated person realizes that.

When people say "stop using oil", it really means stop using it for fuel because that is the vast majority of usage, and if we eliminate that then what's left is not a significant problem. The worldwide demand could probably be satisfied by a handful of drilling rigs instead of the thousands we have now.

After the whole debacle with recycling, I am more inclined to believe this is true.

I agree CO2 has become a red herring. But I believe a lot of intelligent people supported its use for a long time not out of malice, but because it was a single metric that, while not a very good proxy for the various pollutants that are emitted by large polluters, was probably the best single proxy available.

You are underestimating how much man made CO2 is in the atmosphere. Preindustrial CO2 levels were at around 280ppm. Nowadays we are at 415ppm and no sign of any slowdown. 30% of the CO2 in the atmosphere came from burning fossil fuels. We are just a few decades away from doubling CO2 levels compared to preindustrial times.

On the order of millions of years the earth is a self correcting system that always tries to release as much energy as it absorbs. If you disrupt it in mere centuries you're going to see mass extinctions. Humans can adapt but often that just means they migrate to more hospitable locations. It means more refugees than we already have. The negative effects on agriculture will make it harder to feed 8 billion people so eventually civil wars will break out.

We are already seeing mass extinctions though, and biodiversity is generally greater in warmer regions. Unless these extinctions are entirely due to the 0.9 degrees of warming we've seen, there are other factors at play, many of which might yield more bang for our buck if we focused on them instead of net CO2e.

I think of measuring environmental health via CO2 like measuring economic health via GDP - it's probably the best single indicator if we have to use a single indicator, but it ignores a lot of nuance without which a better system can't really be designed.

I think most of the readers here are aware of that. Plus there's a ton of other applications, like plastics, other chemicals etc.

But this article is not about that - this is about one country deciding to get out of oil production. I guess they have discussed this at lenght and decided that, all factors considered, it makes more sense for them to stop oil production, decarbonize their economy as far as possible, and import the oil that they will still need.

You can use renewable energy to produce any form of hydrocarbon chemical you want via Power-to-X processes.

You can synthesize hydrogen from water. You can synthesize methane, methanol or ammonia with hydrogen and CO2 and go on from there to build everything that is built from oil today.

This isn't exactly efficient, and doing this at scale is a huge challenge. But in the end we'll have to find alternatives for all oil products, because making them from oil will inevitably lead to carbon emissions (both in the refinery and at the end of life of products when they decompose in a landfill or get burned).

For the amount of petroleum products used in pharmaceuticals, they can easily be replaced by synthesis from bio-derived precursors. There's nothing special about hydrocarbons from oil.

I think everybody know this. But its something like 10 percent of the oil that is spent on non-fuel.

Clothes, plastics, roads, toothpaste, paint, tires &c.

Chances are wherever you are most of of what you have in your direct sightline contains petroleum in a way or another. Try living without products containing petroleum and you're basically back in 1800s.

Once we run out of it we're truly fucked because we have yet to find viable alternative for most of its use cases.

I consume ~30kg per week of petroleum for my (quite fuel efficient) car, or 1500kg petroleum annually.

I consume maybe somewhere on the order of 2kg per week (100kg/yr) in the form of plastic packaging, toothpaste, rubber, asphalt, etc. And most of this consumption results in solid waste or other inert storage, as opposed to the generation of CO2.

Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses will not mean "you're basically back in 1800s" - those sorts of uses are not as relevant to climate change. You'll still be able to buy tires and toothpaste (though the economics of something like asphalt, which is almost a waste product unless you're doing cracking, might result in alternative materials trials for road surfacing treatments, particularly in urban areas. Interlock pavers are particularly suitable for low-strength situations where asphalt is currently used due to artificially low prices)

> Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses

I never talked about energy and heating, quite the contrary. All I'm saying is that almost everything we use or consume are petroleum derived, that petroleum is not an infinite resource and that for most of these things we don't have anything viable to replace them with yet.

We have the technology to synthesize petroleum and it is economical enough to do now for clothes, paint, consumer plastics, and clothing. These things cost more when made with synthetics, but not substantially so.

The economics of synthetics are cost prohibitive for use in transportation and road construction. But luckily, electric vehicles will continue to reduce the need for petroleum for transportation purposes and asphalt is the most recyclable petroleum product out there. You can literally recycle it on-site.