inarinow imagine how much we could save if we used sailboats
THR GODDAMN ENERGY FALLS FROM THE SKY FOR FREE!!!
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.
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.
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.
Are you just restating the numbers from the Technology Connections video? Or have you verified any of this research yourself?
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.
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
did you read the whole comment? alexander already stated that
If the post is even accurate, that likely doesn't factor in secondary needs. Roads, tires, shampoo, soap, lubricants, hydrogen, solvents, medical plastics. So many things made from oil and oil byproducts.
All of these industries have to be looking into alternatives in parallel, if they are even aware.
All of these industries have to be looking into alternatives in parallel, if they are even aware.
Why?
I mean, I think it would be good, but why would they have to be looking into alternatives? Why couldn't we phase out fossil fuels for burning purposes, and then whenever that's done start thinking about phasing them out for use in other products?
Plastics are a waste product of converting oil to useful fuels. That's why they're so cheap and used in the most unbelievably wasteful ways. They'll remain inextricably linked. Fuel is expensive, plastics are incredibly cheap. If we ban the use of fossil fuels but still rely on oil based plastics, plastics will become very expensive and we'll still be creating the fuel. We'll just have a growing supply of worthless energy sitting around and decaying in storage.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea as I'm not an expert by any means, but to keep plastics for essential uses like in medicine will likely require a heavily subsidized plastic industry at least. But hey we already subsidize the fossil fuel industry directly and by externalizing the planet destroying effects of their use...
not to mention the big one, fertilizers
Those all can be produced from synthetic hydrocarbons made from atmospherically captured CO2. We don't need to drill an oil well to make plastic.
Whoa, seriously? Okay that's awesome to know. And pretty cool.
-- Frost
Asphalt for pavement and shingles is amaong the most recycled materials on the planet.
Soap and shampoo can be made from animal fat or vegetable oil.
Hydrogen can be made from water. You get oxygen too.
These are not unsolveable problems.
They're not problems that need to be solved. If we cut fossil fuel use by 90%, there's hardly any impact on these uses.
Never said unsolvable by any means, but they need to be solved yesterday. Blows the mind too, for all those capitalism-minded people, they have all this untapped "wealth" they could be getting into on the ground floor instead of clinging to oil.
Asphalt for pavement and shingles is amaong the most recycled materials on the planet.
Not how you think. The asphalt is ground up for the mineral content then mixed with new bitumen.
Soap and shampoo can be made from animal fat or vegetable oil.
Most of it is. Cheapest way to do it.
Hydrogen can be made from water. You get oxygen too.
By wasting a lot of electricity.
Hydrogen can be made from water. You get oxygen too.
By wasting a lot of electricity.
Just curious, how is the majority of hydrogen produced/mined/farmed now?
I kinda always assumed it was electrolysis just because the process is so simple.
Petrochemicals are barely 10% of oil usage, not really important by volume.
It was literally the byproduct of fuel production. They had to find uses for it and created the petrochemical revolution.
The issue was we already had ways of making all our products without petroleum byproducts. They also didn't cause cancer which is kind of nice.
shampoo, soap
We could reduce shipping needed for these if it became the norm to ship them dry and mix with water in the home. Bonus: they could be shipped in paper rather than plastic, and consumed from reusable glass bottles rather than plastic.
1000% this. I've been trying to get my household switched over to dry detergents whenever possible. I simply hate the idea of shipping water around, since it is bulky, heavy, and makes up like 70-90% of most household cleaners.
I agree, but the problem is how dangerous many of the chemicals are in dry concentrations.
People already mix household bleach with acidic cleaners. Imagine if they had dry sodium hypochlorite sitting around.
Bleach dispensers at the supermarket or pharmacy sound pretty dystopian but maybe shipping the concentrate and mixing at the PoS is safer.
Bleach dispensers at the supermarket or pharmacy sound pretty dystopian
Why?
Fwiw this idea does exist. Here's one site that sells it. That site has handwash, general household cleaner, dishwashing powder & tablets, etc., as well as glass bottles to use them in. Also something called "bleach alternative". All designed to be shipped dry.
And set up a bottle deposit and return system that only needs to function at a local level. Haha, the solution to one of the big problems I saw with using glass instead of plastics for packaging. Just don't ship it that way, ship it at scale dry in a paper container that collapses to nothing for the return trip, or holds some other good going back.
Could also reduce the shipping needed on these by requiring standard container shapes that can properly be emptied. So many consumer product containers, even food containers, are designed so it is difficult to fully use the product. Companies see it as an uptick in sales because you'll be buying that soap/ketchup/whatever more frequently since you can't use 4 ounces out of the bottom, rather than seeing the cost-savings of not shipping 4oz x thousands of containers of weight pointlessly. (Personally, I go out of my way to empty every container fully, but many see it as a waste of effort.)
The vast majority of oil and gas consumption is just burning the shit in a pile
The oil companies want you to think about plastics to make you think all the oil we drill is important, but it's actually only a tiny fraction. It's all propaganda.
There is indeed propaganda going on, but there is also a reality that many supply chains need conversion, and that money needs to come from somewhere. Not saying it is right, nor that it is unsolvable, just a reality. Most often, the smaller businesses are destroyed by expensive switches to new methods. Which is all we need, more megacorps owning everything.
In a world with functioning governments, processes, grants, tax breaks, and such could be set up to help companies switch.
You forgot normal plastics. 99.99% of all plastic types are basically made from petroleum.
They don't have to be though. We do not need petroleum to make plastics.
Yeah, didn't want to hit every note. Medical specifically requires a higher tolerance and quality level that makes it more challenging to be replaced with alternatives like bioplastics. For most items, I'd be fine buying them in glass or cans again.
but then we'd have to ACTUALLY recycle our tin and aluminium cans. I would RATHER DIE
...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.
seamen’s
What kind of abomination is this?
i found them in my little brother's sock
Employ them as the crew of an interplanetary solar sail expedition. We'll be colonizing the moons of Jupiter in no time!
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.
I prefer my semen unemployed, thank you.
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.
Guy doing marine fuel enters the chat.
Some ships would carry ammonia, hydrogen, etc.
Still better than the status quo.
Some ships would carry ammonia, hydrogen, etc.
there's already a movement to change over to ammonia for fueling shipping. I don't have a good feel for the benefits and drawbacks but it is out there.
https://news.mit.edu/2025/unlocking-ammonia-fuel-source-heavy-industry-amogy-1125
Also, those ships themselves cant run on batteries. So some fossil or liquid fuels would still be needed in some applications.
Renewables... And also reduction. People need to grow up and realize that driving a vanity tank for half a mile to get a gallon of milk is fundamentally unsustainable. Humanity and the planet can no longer afford to support this level of gross privilege, regardless of the "fuel" used.
Electric busses, and trains need to be part of the solution.
And walking. Cities shouldn't be as spread out as they currently are, especially in the US.
🤫pssst,
this is one of the reasons fossil isn’t replaced as fast as it could and should be
Or we could get rid of windmills and underfund solar incentives and research, occupy oil producing nations and try to drive this number higher? It's 2026 people, let's redefine what progress means! 🦅💪🎇
The issue is, that renewable energy requires a lot of rare earth metals. This bring a whole bunch of other issues. Politically and ethically. "In a perfect world it would be... " there is no perfect world. Humans never change.
Modern solar cells and proven storage solutions like sodium ion do not contain these rare elements. Next!
Not wind with sodium ion batteries. EDIT: Source
EDIT: This comment is based on outdated information (see the below thread). A growing number of wind turbines are switching from electromagnets to permanent magnets, the latter of which use rare earth minerals. You could still make wind turbines with electromagnets, but that does likely give countries with rare earth minerals a competitive advantage.
What is the generator made of?
Batteries aren't an energy source but a storage.
Apprently my information is outdated. For a long time, wind turbines used electromagnets (the fact check is from 2016), but it looks like they are starting to use permanent magnets now (which require rare earths). They still don’t need them, and I think a lot of the ones using permanent magnets are from countries which have rare earths, but I will update my initial comment since I don’t want to move the goalposts.
In any case, there is a commenter above that mentioned solar, which according to my link does not need rare earth minerals.
I think the world bank report is a good read, regardless.
not just that but that's millions of jobs worldwide lost.
had we started moving to renewables 40 years ago, like we should have, the impact wouldn't be as bad now.
40 years ago? There was an article release in ~1910-1912 stating that burning coal was increasing carbon rates in the atmosphere. We've known about this for 100+ years. Theres always sentiment about jobs being lost / unstable energy grid.. companies just trying to exhaust fossil fuels before switching
hate to break the news to you...but renewable energy wasn't viable in 1910-1912.
And the first electric car was built in the 1880s, so I think it's fair to say that had people acted, it wouldn't be as out of reach as the common person thinks.
Oh no...think of the economy! We have to keep accelerating climate echange!
let's assume worldwide shipping creates enough jobs for 1% of the world's population. that's 70,000,000 jobs.
if half of those jobs (35,000,000) just poofed out overnight, what would be the global climate impacts after 6-8 months?
I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be positive.
edit: sorry, didn't realize I was on a slrpnk instance where emotions outrank logic.
In a vacuum, sure. Not when you look at the whole picture
Eh. Compare the investments and outcomes of New York Sun Solar Program and Pennsylvania Shell Ethane Cracker Plant.
Inb4
Please think of the Poor Freight Captains and tHe eCoNoMy
Imagine dreaming of allocating resources to better uses. What a crazy idea!
That means fuel will continue to get more expensive as other markets switch to renewable energy sources. That in turn will reduce the number of ships which will make the fuel harder to find, which will reduce the number of products using that fuel, which will eventually result in total elimination of that market.
Unless it's officially propped up by governments at the behest of rich and powerful fossil fuel lobbies!
It's inevitable that it will end some day, but not nearly as fast as it otherwise organically would.
The big costs comes from building the infrastructure for fossil fuels. So as soon as demand falls, you have a huge part of the bill has been paid already. So you get low fossil fuel prices. You need to keep in mind that most large oil producers are state owned. Therefore those states will try to shut down other suppliers production.
You can see that already with sanctions against Russia and Iran to keep US oil producers going strong.
Imagine not having to rely on countries to pump up oil and polluting the earth by burning it.
We have the technology, but for some reason we want to rely on some other party and pay tons of money.
And if you could build and maintain renewable infrastructure without fossil fuels while generating an order of magnitude energy excess that'd be nice.
40 % of ships should probably be decomissioned anyway.
Do you have a source?
I wonder how much of that oil is just used to send planes flying.
in the US i found figures ranging from 6 to 12% the largest sector by usage is road traffic using ~45% of the oil in us
here's a chart for EU
I bet the 12% are direct use (pipe tail), not all the shit that goes into building and maintaining this orchestrated dance, i.e. at lvl 1 the roads, tires, cars, fuel transport etc. and what does into maintaining and operation the infra to keep lvl 1 gking etc. But accounting (oil, co2...) for end products is surprisingly difficult.
Some of it is metallurgical coal..but yeah, big drop will happen eventually
Yeah but that means shipping company profits get cut almost in half and we can't let that happen now can we?
And the ships themselves are of course powered by fossil fuels.
That really depends on what you will run all the remaining ships. Current battery technology isn't suitable for large container ships, sails work for smaller ships. There are ideas to use ammonia as fuel for large ships, and it won't be made were it is consumed, countries like Namibia are planning on becoming large suppliers of ammonia. If this comes true you'll get 40% of all ships just carrying ammonia around the world.
I think you missed the point. The idea is that almost half of shipping is getting around fossil fuels, so we can slash shipping emissions by reducing fossil fuel use.
Ok sorry I will be that guy.
At the outset, let me say renewables are the end goal and the best outcome.
That said there are a number of problems with this approach. This chart doesn't define what 40% it's talking about. Which is actually impossible because metrics in shipping are considered different for different types of ships and trade. I assume this map/post/thing about deadweight tons (DWT), which is the metric you judge liquid and sold bulk goods. For containers it's TEU (twenty foot equivalent units), for offshore vessels it is often but not always bollard pull, for cruise ships its passenger to crew ratio, etc.
Also the original poster may be referring to total tonnage by metric X (dwt, displacement, raw number of ships) or some other unknown metric)
But let's assume this is a good faith argument. In terms of bulk commodities, it is probably true that nearly half the fleet by deadweight is shipping coal, crude, refined products, LNG/LPG. But that is an effect of the size of ships one uses to transport such commodities - they are always very big ships even though there are far more many smaller ships in terms of raw numbers.
And in any case the problem is demand. If people want cheap shit from China and cheap oil from the Gulf, someone is going to ship it. Renewables are the way forward, but if you want to transport a lot of stuff or a lot of people that you cannot transport by rail, planes and ships are the answer. No other source has the energy density of petroleum to ship stuff.
Somewhat ironically, per ton-mile (i.e., how much stuff you can carry per mile), shipping is by FAR the most efficient way in terms of energy consumed. The pollution from ships is horrible, even changing certain weather patterns in the N Pacific, but as long as we have the demand, it will exist.
Mærsk is testing wind and electrical power on their fleet. Won't make the ships 100% self-sufficient, but will hopefully lower the impact of the vessels.
Flettner rotors can cause fuel reductions of 10-20% [source]. Definitely not nothing, but you still need some way to fuel the ship, those rotors don't turn on their own and are AFAIK not used as main propulsion.
I've heard of these things called "sails". Maybe they could look into those.
those are sails, they're just weird
Old sail ships could get stuck for days without wind.
They work. However they are a lot slower - by enough that no shipping company can compete using them. I'm not clear on if they scale to the size of modern ships either.
Pretty sure they don't, at least not as a total replacement. Reducing fuel usage is still a possibility maybe.
They 100% work - just as well as they did in 1700. The slow speed means nobody will use them exclusively. I'm not sure if they need extra labor as well (assuming modern controls) but that is another potential reason nobody would use them. They couD though.
They did not mean the ships become green energy ship, they meant the ships would no longet be sailing at all because we don't need to ship the coal etc.
Also, brrak the larger ships down into several sailing ships. Infinite small sailing ships would be more green than one large fuel burning ship.
i mean, i don't deny that making ports bigger and able to handle more ships (with more infrastructure and people working the ports) would help alleviate some of the problems we're seeing, but it's the whole building more lanes on the freeway problem. build a bigger port and it'll fill up with just as bad traffic
Infinite small sailing ships
And infinite small sailing ships could all simulatenously dock at our fractal infinitely long shorelines, all unloading their infinitely small cargo at the same instant, simultanously flooding the earth with infinite amounts of oil and zero amounts of oil that we wouldn't notice at all. :)
Put mathematically, when we cut fossil fuel usage by 10%, it will result in 4% fewer cargo ships. When we reduce fossil fuel usage by 50%, it will result in a 20% reduction in cargo ships
40% of 60% of all current ships is still a lot less than 40% of 100% of all current ships.
Also there are sail assisted cargo vessels.
Needless to say, there is a lot of room for easy, quick, and achievable today improvement.
nuclear
Several countries already refuse to let nuclear ships into their ports. Also considering the state of some ships (look at Russia's shadow fleet for example) I'm not so sure it's a good idea to have them be powered by nuclear reactors.
