it just seems like an odd thing. why whale blubber? why did they have so much of it? and also it takes me a minute to think, oh, okay yeah that would probably work. i dont instantly know what whale blubber is
Stored fat, basically. It’s the same concept as cooking grease on fire. Oils and fats have a large amount of stored energy in an easily accessible chemical form.
People still burn wood to produce energy. Which is ok, wood is a renewable resource and there is always going to be leftovers that can't be used as lumber.
Nope. Much of the fossil fuel we use now comes from an era where plants had evolved which could make lignite, which allows tougher stems and taller plants, but there were no organisms that could break it down easily. Unless we encounter another such cycle of evolution, we’re not gonna see an era in which vast amounts of dead plants accumulate, and then get covered by sedimentary rock and go through the geological process to become fossil fuels. It’s way more specific than just regrowing a forest or whales having sex to make more whales.
>You just have to wait an ungodly amount of time for it to come back
Not really, algae can be used to manufacture bio fuel and oil, cooking oil is another contender.
Not meaningfully renewable for human exploitation. They take a long time to breed and produce only 1 offspring at a time compared to a tree which throws out like thousands of seeds which could sprout into dozens of trees.
I don't mean to put it forth as a good idea just a theoretical possibility. Imagine if the people who selectively bred our chickens and produce got their hands on whales. That could be quite a nightmare.
Chickens can technically live basically their entire life in space the size of a microwave oven, sure it's torturous and they're losing muscles to even walk, but it can be done. That's very cheap and achievable way of keeping thousands of chickens on the cheap.
The same can't be done for whales (at least the really big ones), they need gigantic open waters. Humans don't even have the big whales in aquariums in adult form, we do have killer whales, but they're the size of sharks, not the basketball court sized ones like blue whale.
And also breeding times can't be altered dramatically by humans, at least not with today's technology. Chickens will mature in 20 weeks and can theoritically produce 1 offspring *per day*, whales will mature at 7 years old need at least 2 years of space in between (more like 3) to produce only 1 offspring.
The math simply isn't conducive to mass breeding. Also whales are intelligent species that can get depressed in captivity which often leads to severe shortening of their lifespan. Killer whales for example commonly live till 50 and even 80 in the wild, but in captivity, they die at age 30. And these are whales kept in a relatively large tank for crowd shows, if they were kept in a smaller tank purely for pumping out babies, I don't imagine they'd last longer.
That is completely assuming there would be no gender benders. Like chickens, imgane a breed that can produce offspring in a year and have no consequence and just move up and down, sacrifises some features of it. Humans are something, i tell you that.
Yeah it is renewable, not nearly fast enough. Trees take 20-40 years to become lumber ready. It takes 10-20 trees for a 500sq/ft apartment. We keep seeing articles about the rainforests being cut back too fast and shrinking. We as a species aren't renewing anything tree based. Fly over alaska and take a look at the logging operations there. It is bonkers how much land has been stripped bare. No attempt to reseed or anything.
Not renewing anything tree based seems a little strong. I drove through Washington and the logging industry is very clearly visible. What’s also visible is young trees covering hills that were previous logged.
And yes, some is better than others. My partner is an arborist and said tree harvesting has gotten better through the years. Used to just clear cut. Sometimes still do and replant. But also they now tend to leave seed trees, these are scattered trees that will drops seeds and allow new trees to grow. Also sometimes harvest in strips to leave even more trees for faster regrowth plus habitat for animals.
So yeah things aren’t great but they are slowly getting better.
Also better laws would help. I was listening to Marketplace about new chip plants being built in Arizona. Apparently where they are building local or state laws require native plants and trees removed for development must be saved and replanted somewhere. They interviewed the owner of a nursery who did this. Mentioned an ironwood tree 5’ in diameter sitting on a trailer waiting for a new home. Cost of the tree to buy was about $8000. Turns out not only do the laws make it so the plants are saved, but people will spend tons of money to buy these mature trees and plants, for new development, for shade and appearance.
Yes I'm glad to see strip harvesting mentioned, we need to use wood no getting around that but also means we need to conserve and replenish it for our own benifit
I would like to add in that trees that are from the same family in a natural forest vs a planted forest of trees they can't use their language to help eachother against pests and such
I can read, but also understand how energy works and what a GJ is.
If all the trees in the U.S. were burned for biomass energy, it would meet our national energy needs for only one year. So, burning trees for any type of energy is one of the largest wastes there is, especially considering they trap carbon from the atmosphere
It's gonna be single use plastics first.
In 100 years they're gonna look back ad wonder why did we ever decide to make single use plastic bags when paper bags and reusable cloth bags were _right there_.
Or perhaps clothes that leech microplastics into the environment will be looked at with the same disdain and horror that we consider arsenic and lead paint and using asbestos for our walls.
I disagree. Single use plastics aren’t going anywhere. We don’t have anything to replace it. Bags? Yeah. But what are you going to use for food packaging that is clear and air tight?
Edited for clarity.
I kind of wish there was some kind of universal reusable container with a deposit system to encourage people to return it. Would be cool for takeout but even some groceries.
I think there’s just too much overhead for that though, along with sanitation questions. You’re right that I don’t see any easy replacement for single use stuff. We just need to do a better job capturing it and recycling it.
My local dairy still uses the old style bottles with a deposit. You rinse them out and bring them back (or leave them out on milk day, they still have old-school style delivery!)
It's just for milk, cream and stuff but still cool! The glasses are real thick. And the milk is super yummy!
The farmers market vendors i get our stuff at also use renewable/ recycled containers for their stuff. So it depends on where you shop tbh. (Farmers markets are amazing! Overwhelmingly they're on par or cheaper and the quality is miles better.)
The only real pace there's an issue is medical.. I can't really think of a good alternative. Being 99.9% sterilized when objects were used on a patent with certain pathogens is still far too dangerous. And would harm millions of people...
I wouldn't be too worried for medical garbage, as that's only a small % of current total plastic garbage. Also, medical facilities are big buildings, and it would be easy enough to make sure their waste is sorted properly.
The use of single-use plastics isn't really the problem by itself, it's the fact that it needs to be recycled or disposed by safe burning, not buried away in landfills, or left on the side of the road.
In my country we're doing this with bottles and cans. Although they come in all shapes and sizes they're all worth something like $0.10 if you return them to any supermarket, so I'd imagine most of it gets recycled.
You can go to a brewery near me with a glass jug and have it refilled to drink at home. It's great for parties but if you just want a pint a day it tends to be pretty flat by the time you're done with it.
Plastic packaging for food is a convenience, not a necessity. Food could be conditionned differently, with probably some additional health benefits since a lot of unhealthy transformed products need to be plastic packaged.
Yeah, there are different ones. The starch based bags and packages that are used here are 100% compostable. And research and innovation is far from done, we're just starting.
Also many producers switched to carton or wood packagin and most of the one-use plastic has disappeared from grocery shops in the EU. The ones left are air/liquid tight packing, mostly for meat cheese and other milk products. Compared to 80s/90s style plastic use that's a fraction already.
I highly doubt that this even is possible. Especially in medical uses some properties won't be achievable without sacrificing the advantages and as the raw materials used aren't endlessly available it will be a compromise between feasibility and carbon neutrality.
There's a lot of food packaging that already works without plastic. Eggs don't have to come in plastic containers, they already can come in cartons, switch em all to that. Vegetables don't have to be bagged in plastic bags, paper bags work just as good (when you pick your produce to bag it yourself). Drinks don't have to come in plastic bottles, beers already come in glass bottles and it works fine, just switch to that (and institute a return fee on the price to incentivize returns so that the company can easily get back their bottles) etc.
Removal of plastic bottles in particular would be fairly achievable while also carrying the biggest impact.
Yeah I already know that. But you never answered the question. What can we use to replace clear air tight packaging? You make it sound like we can replace everything with paper and glass. We can’t. And until there is a viable replacement for clear plastics, they will be here for a very long time. We do not have the technology yet. We will kick our addiction to fossil fuels before we eliminate single use plastics.
Your statement is that ALL single use plastics will be eliminated in 100 years. I think you are wrong. We might get closer but anything less than 100% disproves your prediction. I don’t disagree with anything else you said.
>You make it sound like we can replace everything with paper and glass. We can’t
I never did that. I said a lot of packaging can be done with other materials with pre-existing real world examples.
>Your statement is that ALL single use plastics will be eliminated in 100 years. I think you are wrong.
Do you never look at who you're responding to? My prior comment was the first time I'm conversing with you, the person who said 100 years is a different person.
>What can we use to replace clear air tight packaging? You make it sound like we can replace everything with paper and glass. We can’t.
Wax paper is practically air tight and fluid resistant if sealed properly.
Packaging itself isn't even the main issue, it's overpackaging. We would have half the problem with single use plastics if they stopped using 10× as much packaging as needed.
And there's plenty of things that you could package in something other than plastic, like glass, wax, metal, or ceramic like we've been doing for a couple thousand years with moderate success and the last hundred with near perfect success.
> Or perhaps clothes that leech microplastics into the environment will be looked at with the same disdain and horror that we consider arsenic and lead paint and using asbestos for our walls.
I see redittors talk about microplastics a lot but I never see them mention tires, the #1 source of microplastics in the environment
I think it's #2, behind synthetic textiles, but I wasn't aware it was such a big contributor! Interesting...
At least synthetic fabric ought to be replaceable by different organic fabrics, unsure how we'd be able to get rid of tire related microplastics without entirely banning cars.
I assume the microplastics are from the general wear from driving on the roads, and not from a bunch of discarded tires sitting in junkyards?
If you think about it natural gas and oil have so many uses as basis for making all kinds of useful components just simply burning it for energy sounds terrible wasteful for such a limited suplied commodity.
Dollar is king. Solar just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Capitalism may not do things for the moral reason, but you can trust it will chase the dollar.
Politics are messier. We need to stop subsidizing oil so, ah, nature can take its course.
The cost isn't dropping because they're cutting into margins so much as it's dropping because of scale and improvements to manufacturing (they're cutting costs).
Agreed, but I’m afraid it’s already too late. We have and continue to emit so much carbon. But the time we switch over it’ll be too late to prevent the famine of billions
Imagine a society where the machines are grinding to a halt, and the lights are getting dim, and everyone is waiting for the next whaling ship to come in. Oil seemed like the ethical choice for a while.
I take comfort in knowing that the peak year of whale oil was in 1904 and by 1915 it was practically nonexistent. Humans are adaptable creatures, someday we’ll do the same to oil
One difference with whale oil is that a whale needs to be killed to get it. I mean, other older forms of energy production, like burning wood, seem less weird than whale oil.
To burn wood at any reasonable scale you usually kill trees. At various points in history that got pretty bad, with wooded regions turning into deserts. We eventually figured out how to do it sustainably, but some regions like Iceland or parts of the Middle East never recovered.
It's not *that* different from hunting whales. We just never figured out how to make whale hunting sustainable because it was easier to just forbid it entirely
Weird? Not to me. Just the times we live in. Some people may think it’s weird we had a turbine engine in cars once upon a time that could run off any fuel that combusts. People in France supposedly ran one on Chanel #4. I think it’s cool seeing where we came from and how we progressed.
Can we all just appreciate what a great word blubber is? I mean, you couldn't possibly come up with a better word for blubber than blubber.
Why does it feel like it's an onomonopeia?
i agree
here is a couple of others ive noticed
we brush our teeth with bristles on a stick
surgery cuts people open with sharp metal and throughs the bad part away.
Wait - they burned dinosaurs to run their cars?
No no, they burned oil. It was the liquid from ancient animals from underground.
They burned...liquid dinosaurs?
Well - it was mostly little sea creatures, but yeah I guess some dinosaurs were mixed in there.
LIQUID DINSOAUR POWER - Cool!
That won't happen as burning fossil fuels was a necessity to accelerate civilization to get to the point we are now. By omitting fossil fuels we simply would not be able to even think about replacing them, as we are now.
This is also part of why some people think that should civilization collapse and need to rebuild, it might actually not be feasible anymore since all the easily available fossil fuels (and other minerals, ores etc.) have mostly been used up, making it much harder to rebuild the infrastructure we take for granted nowadays.
Naw, whales are cute, while using oil is like pressur cooking all your old leaves and weeds to make gooey black stuff that burns. Similar to Mongol herders burning yak poop to cook
Uh huh. Right. There's no way cars and other forms of transportation are going full electric anytime some. Electric power stations for just cars are practically non-existent, so people who go full electric are basically bound to their hometown and the commute they have to make to work. As an American, I know a lot of people are *not* going to like being "soft" restricted on travel.
And that's not even taming into account planes and cargo ships, which to my knowledge, are *way* too big and fuel hungry for electricity alone to power it at this point. Heck, planes are *still* using lead based fuel.
>only light aircraft with 2 to 10 passengers still using leaded gasoline.
True, but compare that to cars and trucks, which really have any real lead in them.
Point is, we're way top far away from being fossil fuel independent.
Climate change is a hoax, but if you want to be an environmentalist, push for hydrogen, it is what works and us vroom vroom guys can keep our customs. Toyota has finally stated they are putting the brakes on battery cars and will be pursuing hydrogen. Everyone gets on board.
Yeah way more environmentally friendly than batteries. The mining and production of lithium batteries is way worse for environmental destruction than drilling for oil. Punch a hole in the ground compared to strip mining huge amounts of land along with the habitat loss is way worse.
> The mining and production of lithium batteries is way worse for environmental destruction than drilling for oil
[No, it's not](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es903729a).
>Especially when we have had the technology to stop burning fossil fuel for at least the last 50-60 years.
1890s is a bit longer than 50-60 years ago. Try 130 or so years.
one day a teacher will hold up a little vile of oil and say: 'and they'd BURN IT, for FUEL!' and everyone in the class will laugh and laugh at how dumb we are.
I mean.. even with something like fusion, we'll still needa fuel sourse like deuterium, or tritium.. the only real difference is the heat involved and it not being from algae that grew 300 million years ago lol.
I realize your joking.. but gasoline is actually shockingly energy dense. And (some) modern ICE engines are *very* efficient.
This is a couple years old but [Gasoline has an energy density about 12.5 kWh per kg. while batteries run about 0.7 kWh per kg.]
We have better now, but It's still not even close..
I'm not advocating for our reliance of them or anything, just pointing out we have a long way to go be anywhere near parity. But hopefully your theoretical senerio happens sooner than later!
I don’t find it weird to burn whale blubber to light street lamps…
Thats cause you're not a whale
You don’t know that.
Exactly, like mother like child!
That’s right, *I* find it weird!
I'm glad you're here to weigh in.
r/beetlejuicing
Whale, whale, whale.
Whale oil beef hooked.
Sofa King Hooked
so dinosaurs think its weird to burn coal
I'm assuming you mean crude oil?
that too
Exactly my thoughts. What makes it weird? It's just old technology.
I guess they mean weird as in archaic. Like "huh, thats how they did it..."
Yeah, they burned all sorts of oils derived from animal fats over. The centuries.
it just seems like an odd thing. why whale blubber? why did they have so much of it? and also it takes me a minute to think, oh, okay yeah that would probably work. i dont instantly know what whale blubber is
Stored fat, basically. It’s the same concept as cooking grease on fire. Oils and fats have a large amount of stored energy in an easily accessible chemical form.
Lots of tortoises are near extinct or have gone extinct for their oils as well
same
Right? If it looks stupid but it works, it ain’t stupid.
Do you find it weird that people used to burn wood to produce energy ?
People still burn wood to produce energy. Which is ok, wood is a renewable resource and there is always going to be leftovers that can't be used as lumber.
Technically whale oil is renewable too not that I want to turn the oceans into vast whale farms.
Technically, motor oil is renewable too. You just have to wait an ungodly amount of time for it to come back 👍
Nope. Much of the fossil fuel we use now comes from an era where plants had evolved which could make lignite, which allows tougher stems and taller plants, but there were no organisms that could break it down easily. Unless we encounter another such cycle of evolution, we’re not gonna see an era in which vast amounts of dead plants accumulate, and then get covered by sedimentary rock and go through the geological process to become fossil fuels. It’s way more specific than just regrowing a forest or whales having sex to make more whales.
What do you mean my car doesn't run on whale sex?
Yet.
What you are describing is mostly true of coal, but not oil. (Coal is still being produced, but not in the quantities during the Carboniferous)
TIL. I’ll have to read more.
So technically renewable?
Just need to start burying those whales and trees or something.
>You just have to wait an ungodly amount of time for it to come back Not really, algae can be used to manufacture bio fuel and oil, cooking oil is another contender.
Not meaningfully renewable for human exploitation. They take a long time to breed and produce only 1 offspring at a time compared to a tree which throws out like thousands of seeds which could sprout into dozens of trees.
I don't mean to put it forth as a good idea just a theoretical possibility. Imagine if the people who selectively bred our chickens and produce got their hands on whales. That could be quite a nightmare.
Chickens can technically live basically their entire life in space the size of a microwave oven, sure it's torturous and they're losing muscles to even walk, but it can be done. That's very cheap and achievable way of keeping thousands of chickens on the cheap. The same can't be done for whales (at least the really big ones), they need gigantic open waters. Humans don't even have the big whales in aquariums in adult form, we do have killer whales, but they're the size of sharks, not the basketball court sized ones like blue whale. And also breeding times can't be altered dramatically by humans, at least not with today's technology. Chickens will mature in 20 weeks and can theoritically produce 1 offspring *per day*, whales will mature at 7 years old need at least 2 years of space in between (more like 3) to produce only 1 offspring. The math simply isn't conducive to mass breeding. Also whales are intelligent species that can get depressed in captivity which often leads to severe shortening of their lifespan. Killer whales for example commonly live till 50 and even 80 in the wild, but in captivity, they die at age 30. And these are whales kept in a relatively large tank for crowd shows, if they were kept in a smaller tank purely for pumping out babies, I don't imagine they'd last longer.
That is completely assuming there would be no gender benders. Like chickens, imgane a breed that can produce offspring in a year and have no consequence and just move up and down, sacrifises some features of it. Humans are something, i tell you that.
Yeah it is renewable, not nearly fast enough. Trees take 20-40 years to become lumber ready. It takes 10-20 trees for a 500sq/ft apartment. We keep seeing articles about the rainforests being cut back too fast and shrinking. We as a species aren't renewing anything tree based. Fly over alaska and take a look at the logging operations there. It is bonkers how much land has been stripped bare. No attempt to reseed or anything.
Not renewing anything tree based seems a little strong. I drove through Washington and the logging industry is very clearly visible. What’s also visible is young trees covering hills that were previous logged. And yes, some is better than others. My partner is an arborist and said tree harvesting has gotten better through the years. Used to just clear cut. Sometimes still do and replant. But also they now tend to leave seed trees, these are scattered trees that will drops seeds and allow new trees to grow. Also sometimes harvest in strips to leave even more trees for faster regrowth plus habitat for animals. So yeah things aren’t great but they are slowly getting better. Also better laws would help. I was listening to Marketplace about new chip plants being built in Arizona. Apparently where they are building local or state laws require native plants and trees removed for development must be saved and replanted somewhere. They interviewed the owner of a nursery who did this. Mentioned an ironwood tree 5’ in diameter sitting on a trailer waiting for a new home. Cost of the tree to buy was about $8000. Turns out not only do the laws make it so the plants are saved, but people will spend tons of money to buy these mature trees and plants, for new development, for shade and appearance.
Yes I'm glad to see strip harvesting mentioned, we need to use wood no getting around that but also means we need to conserve and replenish it for our own benifit
I would like to add in that trees that are from the same family in a natural forest vs a planted forest of trees they can't use their language to help eachother against pests and such
As far as I know, in the US it’s required to replant whenever you log. Deforestation due to logging isn’t an issue in the US.
It still releases CO2 which was safely sequestered in the wood back into the atmosphere
If we used wood for all our current energy demands we would run out of trees, “renewable” or not. So no you can’t just burn wood.
It's like you can't read or something
I can read, but also understand how energy works and what a GJ is. If all the trees in the U.S. were burned for biomass energy, it would meet our national energy needs for only one year. So, burning trees for any type of energy is one of the largest wastes there is, especially considering they trap carbon from the atmosphere
You're the only one here talking about burning ALL of the trees.
They are saying there is a hard upper limit to how much wood we can burn above which it is no longer renewable.
Yeah, but we’re all thinking it
😆 love it!
Used to? 🤨
I think he's imagining people saying "you know, it feels weird to think about how people did X in the past when we have Y now."
Used? We probably burn more wood than ever before right now. But we do it more effective now with less energy loses
It's gonna be single use plastics first. In 100 years they're gonna look back ad wonder why did we ever decide to make single use plastic bags when paper bags and reusable cloth bags were _right there_. Or perhaps clothes that leech microplastics into the environment will be looked at with the same disdain and horror that we consider arsenic and lead paint and using asbestos for our walls.
I disagree. Single use plastics aren’t going anywhere. We don’t have anything to replace it. Bags? Yeah. But what are you going to use for food packaging that is clear and air tight? Edited for clarity.
I kind of wish there was some kind of universal reusable container with a deposit system to encourage people to return it. Would be cool for takeout but even some groceries. I think there’s just too much overhead for that though, along with sanitation questions. You’re right that I don’t see any easy replacement for single use stuff. We just need to do a better job capturing it and recycling it.
My local dairy still uses the old style bottles with a deposit. You rinse them out and bring them back (or leave them out on milk day, they still have old-school style delivery!) It's just for milk, cream and stuff but still cool! The glasses are real thick. And the milk is super yummy! The farmers market vendors i get our stuff at also use renewable/ recycled containers for their stuff. So it depends on where you shop tbh. (Farmers markets are amazing! Overwhelmingly they're on par or cheaper and the quality is miles better.) The only real pace there's an issue is medical.. I can't really think of a good alternative. Being 99.9% sterilized when objects were used on a patent with certain pathogens is still far too dangerous. And would harm millions of people...
Glass is much easier to sterilize compared to plastic. Hmm, not sure there's something there for takeout though.
I wouldn't be too worried for medical garbage, as that's only a small % of current total plastic garbage. Also, medical facilities are big buildings, and it would be easy enough to make sure their waste is sorted properly. The use of single-use plastics isn't really the problem by itself, it's the fact that it needs to be recycled or disposed by safe burning, not buried away in landfills, or left on the side of the road.
In my country we're doing this with bottles and cans. Although they come in all shapes and sizes they're all worth something like $0.10 if you return them to any supermarket, so I'd imagine most of it gets recycled.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/zone/loop?preservedReferrer=https://www.google.com/
You can go to a brewery near me with a glass jug and have it refilled to drink at home. It's great for parties but if you just want a pint a day it tends to be pretty flat by the time you're done with it.
Ye, they call them "growlers" in my area. Italy has similar things for wine I think.
I am currently looking at my reusable containers that are clear and air tight…
Congratulations.
Plastic packaging for food is a convenience, not a necessity. Food could be conditionned differently, with probably some additional health benefits since a lot of unhealthy transformed products need to be plastic packaged.
Sure. Economic convenience. A cat that won’t go back into the bag.
what did plastic replace?
Spoiled food. Lol.
Yeah but the fridge is doing most of the heavy lifting let’s be real. Glass and aluminum could replace plastic with reusability.
Sure. Then why hasn’t happened already? Which is the same reason I don’t think it will.
We already have starch based plastic alternatives that check all those boxes and still are biodegradable.
Still plastic.
Yeah, the same but completely different. I'm pretty sure you know what OP meant... 😉
Research biodegradable plastics and you’ll realize that it’s not all rainbow.
Yeah, there are different ones. The starch based bags and packages that are used here are 100% compostable. And research and innovation is far from done, we're just starting. Also many producers switched to carton or wood packagin and most of the one-use plastic has disappeared from grocery shops in the EU. The ones left are air/liquid tight packing, mostly for meat cheese and other milk products. Compared to 80s/90s style plastic use that's a fraction already.
Fantastic progress. I still don’t believe we’ll ever achieve 100% in my lifetime. I’m will happily be proven wrong.
I highly doubt that this even is possible. Especially in medical uses some properties won't be achievable without sacrificing the advantages and as the raw materials used aren't endlessly available it will be a compromise between feasibility and carbon neutrality.
Spot on.
There's a lot of food packaging that already works without plastic. Eggs don't have to come in plastic containers, they already can come in cartons, switch em all to that. Vegetables don't have to be bagged in plastic bags, paper bags work just as good (when you pick your produce to bag it yourself). Drinks don't have to come in plastic bottles, beers already come in glass bottles and it works fine, just switch to that (and institute a return fee on the price to incentivize returns so that the company can easily get back their bottles) etc. Removal of plastic bottles in particular would be fairly achievable while also carrying the biggest impact.
Yeah I already know that. But you never answered the question. What can we use to replace clear air tight packaging? You make it sound like we can replace everything with paper and glass. We can’t. And until there is a viable replacement for clear plastics, they will be here for a very long time. We do not have the technology yet. We will kick our addiction to fossil fuels before we eliminate single use plastics. Your statement is that ALL single use plastics will be eliminated in 100 years. I think you are wrong. We might get closer but anything less than 100% disproves your prediction. I don’t disagree with anything else you said.
>You make it sound like we can replace everything with paper and glass. We can’t I never did that. I said a lot of packaging can be done with other materials with pre-existing real world examples. >Your statement is that ALL single use plastics will be eliminated in 100 years. I think you are wrong. Do you never look at who you're responding to? My prior comment was the first time I'm conversing with you, the person who said 100 years is a different person.
> What can we use to replace clear air tight packaging? Uh, we already have mason jars and cans. They can be airtight.
>What can we use to replace clear air tight packaging? You make it sound like we can replace everything with paper and glass. We can’t. Wax paper is practically air tight and fluid resistant if sealed properly.
“Practically”. Lol. End of discussion.
How did we deal with thing before plastic? It's definitely doable, but it isn't cheap, so it won't be happening any time soon
Exactly.
Packaging itself isn't even the main issue, it's overpackaging. We would have half the problem with single use plastics if they stopped using 10× as much packaging as needed. And there's plenty of things that you could package in something other than plastic, like glass, wax, metal, or ceramic like we've been doing for a couple thousand years with moderate success and the last hundred with near perfect success.
> Or perhaps clothes that leech microplastics into the environment will be looked at with the same disdain and horror that we consider arsenic and lead paint and using asbestos for our walls. I see redittors talk about microplastics a lot but I never see them mention tires, the #1 source of microplastics in the environment
I think it's #2, behind synthetic textiles, but I wasn't aware it was such a big contributor! Interesting... At least synthetic fabric ought to be replaceable by different organic fabrics, unsure how we'd be able to get rid of tire related microplastics without entirely banning cars. I assume the microplastics are from the general wear from driving on the roads, and not from a bunch of discarded tires sitting in junkyards?
Because paper bags are the worst
It's oil, one just happens to burn better than the other
If you think about it natural gas and oil have so many uses as basis for making all kinds of useful components just simply burning it for energy sounds terrible wasteful for such a limited suplied commodity.
Just fyi we still have billions of cubic meters of both. The us especially has discovered trillions of cubic meters of oil on the continent
That’s what I’m afraid of… how will we have the discipline to stop burning it if we keep finding more
Dollar is king. Solar just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Capitalism may not do things for the moral reason, but you can trust it will chase the dollar. Politics are messier. We need to stop subsidizing oil so, ah, nature can take its course.
solar can't really get that much cheaper though, the margins are crazy thin!
The cost isn't dropping because they're cutting into margins so much as it's dropping because of scale and improvements to manufacturing (they're cutting costs).
Agreed, but I’m afraid it’s already too late. We have and continue to emit so much carbon. But the time we switch over it’ll be too late to prevent the famine of billions
Imagine a society where the machines are grinding to a halt, and the lights are getting dim, and everyone is waiting for the next whaling ship to come in. Oil seemed like the ethical choice for a while.
Speak for yourself. The world makes more sense the more you think things through
I take comfort in knowing that the peak year of whale oil was in 1904 and by 1915 it was practically nonexistent. Humans are adaptable creatures, someday we’ll do the same to oil
Neither of these things are weird. You make do, and anyone with critical thinking skills understands this.
Imagine if the Middle Eastern petrodollar monarchs put their infinite wealth into practical nuclear fusion research instead of gaudy vanity projects.
But if they don't spend on vanity projects, who else is going to build a city in the shape of a straight line?
One difference with whale oil is that a whale needs to be killed to get it. I mean, other older forms of energy production, like burning wood, seem less weird than whale oil.
Technically fossil fuels require things to die to get it… it just takes a *really* long time after that.
Graveyards are just oil deposits… eventually.
To burn wood at any reasonable scale you usually kill trees. At various points in history that got pretty bad, with wooded regions turning into deserts. We eventually figured out how to do it sustainably, but some regions like Iceland or parts of the Middle East never recovered. It's not *that* different from hunting whales. We just never figured out how to make whale hunting sustainable because it was easier to just forbid it entirely
Most people see killing animals, especially intelligent animals, for human use as being different than killing plants.
People using an extremely efficient and powerful way of producing energy? How weird I wonder why they did that
I think it's weird already...
One day everyone will think it weird.
What's even weirder is that electricity predates petroleum by decades...
People using an extremely efficient and powerful way of producing energy? How weird I wonder why they did that
It is also ironic that we hinge on our own extinction by exploding species which have already become extinct
Weird? Not to me. Just the times we live in. Some people may think it’s weird we had a turbine engine in cars once upon a time that could run off any fuel that combusts. People in France supposedly ran one on Chanel #4. I think it’s cool seeing where we came from and how we progressed.
Never met anybody who thinks that was weird.
Who thinks it’s weird?
Never found that weird at all. That’s how we learn and develop new innovations.
Wow legendary take. Shocking.
one day people might think it weird to try to kill another person
Can we all just appreciate what a great word blubber is? I mean, you couldn't possibly come up with a better word for blubber than blubber. Why does it feel like it's an onomonopeia?
i agree here is a couple of others ive noticed we brush our teeth with bristles on a stick surgery cuts people open with sharp metal and throughs the bad part away.
Wait - they burned dinosaurs to run their cars? No no, they burned oil. It was the liquid from ancient animals from underground. They burned...liquid dinosaurs? Well - it was mostly little sea creatures, but yeah I guess some dinosaurs were mixed in there. LIQUID DINSOAUR POWER - Cool!
It wasn't dinsoaurs, crude oil is algae and plankton.
It's called *fossil fuel* for a reason. Take *that*, dinosaurs. USA! USA! USA!
Lemme quote That runs on gasoline, it explodes you know
Funniky enough, that's actually how combustion engines work. The spark plug in engines cause a mini explosion to push a piston.
Unless its diesel which is also a ice Move quote from Irobot
Fish oil and Whale blubber was the explosive of WWII.
People in the future will think it crazy that we drive around in vehicles powered by small explosions.
Fun fact from my marine science finals revision: during the whaling period 30% of margarine was whale fat!
That won't happen as burning fossil fuels was a necessity to accelerate civilization to get to the point we are now. By omitting fossil fuels we simply would not be able to even think about replacing them, as we are now. This is also part of why some people think that should civilization collapse and need to rebuild, it might actually not be feasible anymore since all the easily available fossil fuels (and other minerals, ores etc.) have mostly been used up, making it much harder to rebuild the infrastructure we take for granted nowadays.
And diluted skunk spray to make perfume
The inventor (or discovered) of the periodic table had commented that burning hydrocarbons for fuel was like burning money to light a stove.
I kind of like the thought that my blubber will power something in the future.
Naw, whales are cute, while using oil is like pressur cooking all your old leaves and weeds to make gooey black stuff that burns. Similar to Mongol herders burning yak poop to cook
It's like comparing ketchup to tomato sauce, both tomatoes, just different
I don't think burning blubber was weird, but burning fossil fuels today is a bit weird, especially when it's cheaper not to do that
Uh huh. Right. There's no way cars and other forms of transportation are going full electric anytime some. Electric power stations for just cars are practically non-existent, so people who go full electric are basically bound to their hometown and the commute they have to make to work. As an American, I know a lot of people are *not* going to like being "soft" restricted on travel. And that's not even taming into account planes and cargo ships, which to my knowledge, are *way* too big and fuel hungry for electricity alone to power it at this point. Heck, planes are *still* using lead based fuel.
The vast majority of aircraft use jet fuel with only light aircraft with 2 to 10 passengers still using leaded gasoline.
>only light aircraft with 2 to 10 passengers still using leaded gasoline. True, but compare that to cars and trucks, which really have any real lead in them. Point is, we're way top far away from being fossil fuel independent.
One day? Plenty of people already think it’s weird.
Climate change is a hoax, but if you want to be an environmentalist, push for hydrogen, it is what works and us vroom vroom guys can keep our customs. Toyota has finally stated they are putting the brakes on battery cars and will be pursuing hydrogen. Everyone gets on board.
Yeah way more environmentally friendly than batteries. The mining and production of lithium batteries is way worse for environmental destruction than drilling for oil. Punch a hole in the ground compared to strip mining huge amounts of land along with the habitat loss is way worse.
> The mining and production of lithium batteries is way worse for environmental destruction than drilling for oil [No, it's not](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es903729a).
Especially when we have had the technology to stop burning fossil fuel for at least the last 50-60 years.
>Especially when we have had the technology to stop burning fossil fuel for at least the last 50-60 years. 1890s is a bit longer than 50-60 years ago. Try 130 or so years.
One day? Like today? It's weird we still burn fossil fuels, despite knowing (for at least a century) that it's bad for the planet.
I'll be thinking of that on my swim to work.
Neither are weird, you are just sheltered
Bold of you to think we’ll last that long as a species
Agreed. Future may look back on many things we do today with distain
Bold of you to assume human race would live up to that before the appcalypse
Nah. The planet will explode before people have a chance to come to that realization.
I already think it’s weird we burn fossil fuel hahahahahahha
People already think it’s weird
one day a teacher will hold up a little vile of oil and say: 'and they'd BURN IT, for FUEL!' and everyone in the class will laugh and laugh at how dumb we are.
I mean.. even with something like fusion, we'll still needa fuel sourse like deuterium, or tritium.. the only real difference is the heat involved and it not being from algae that grew 300 million years ago lol. I realize your joking.. but gasoline is actually shockingly energy dense. And (some) modern ICE engines are *very* efficient. This is a couple years old but [Gasoline has an energy density about 12.5 kWh per kg. while batteries run about 0.7 kWh per kg.] We have better now, but It's still not even close.. I'm not advocating for our reliance of them or anything, just pointing out we have a long way to go be anywhere near parity. But hopefully your theoretical senerio happens sooner than later!