alt Hacker NewsYou could visit an alternate timeline where you have as much renewable investment into energy as you'd like going back decades and while it would help with the fertiliser situation massively it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.
You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
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You don't have to get carbon from oil extracted from underground and you don't have to get oil from the middle east. That's merely where the bulk of it happens to come from at present for price and historical reasons.
Yes, but all those things, combined, are 20% of the usage. I'd say if you remove about the 50 % used for cars, that's a pretty large improvement.
> it wouldn't solve the problem of needing a supply of carbon atoms to make the carbon-based substances in the list.
How many of that could be substituted with biomass? We're already making natural gas replacements using feces, food and agricultural waste, and we're making diesel fuel replacements - in case of doubt, at least older diesel engines can burn straight olive, sunflower or rapeseed oil, just modern ones will possibly incur expensive damage in the high-pressure fuel distribution section.
> You can't make insulin, brake fluid or PVC out of electricity alone.
Insulin is made with GMO bacteria these days, so all we need is something to feed the bacteria with, IIRC it's glucose which you can easily create from any sort of starch-containing plant.
Nothing here challenges the assertion of the parent comment.
Fossil fuels are why climate change is occurring. Reducing FFs to near-zero would slow or stop climate change and allow the finite supply of oil to be used for the things you mention.
I think the point is that a world with renewable electricity wouldn't need as much oil, thereby making smaller sources of carbon sufficient.