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Re:The Danish climate minister closing down the nation’s oil... by lm28469 on Monday December 07, 2020 @08:33AM (#25331967)
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.

Re:The Danish climate minister closing down the nation’s oil... by SECProto on Monday December 07, 2020 @11:20AM (#25333578)
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)

Re:The Danish climate minister closing down the nation’s oil... by lm28469 on Monday December 07, 2020 @03:59PM (#25337432)
> 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.

Re:The Danish climate minister closing down the nation’s oil... by mywittyname on Monday December 07, 2020 @11:51AM (#25333909)
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.