{"id":429875,"date":"2026-05-03T07:47:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T07:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/429875\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T07:47:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T07:47:06","slug":"living-without-fossil-fuel-is-harder-than-we-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/429875\/","title":{"rendered":"Living Without Fossil Fuel Is Harder Than We Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Caitlin Cassidy is a journalist in Sydney, Australia, home to two of the world\u2019s most iconic buildings. The first is the Queen Victoria Building \u2014 known to city residents as the QVB. Opened in 1898, it contains five stories of shops and restaurants and occupies an entire city block. The other is the equally impressive Sydney Opera House that has become not only the defining structure in the city but also a source of pride for all Australians.<\/p>\n

Recently, Cassidy embarked on a quest to spend an entire day without using any products derived from fossil fuel. She failed \u2014 miserably. Professor Yuan Chen, the head of the advanced carbon research lab at the University of Sydney, was not surprised. He told Cassidy her project was \u201cimpossible\u201d and \u201cnot scientifically correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet she persisted. Her description of her travails<\/a> during her day without fossil fuel makes for interesting reading, with several chuckles along the way for the reader and an occasional guffaw. There were two main challenges she had to overcome in order to be successful in her quest to avoid fossil fuel products. First, virtually every product you can think of is transported at some point by ship, train, airplane, or truck and the vast majority of those are powered by diesel fuel or its equivalent.<\/p>\n

Second, fossil fuels \u2014 whether oil or methane \u2014 are hydrocarbons. Chemists for the past 100 years have spent their entire careers learning how to rearrange chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms into interesting new materials such as nylon, dacron, polyethylene, teflon, and tens of thousands of other things that humans never knew they needed until they were invented and then found they couldn\u2019t live without them.<\/p>\n

Even using cotton towels is a dilemma. Chen told Cassidy, \u201cIn order to efficiently grow cotton, you need a lot of fertilizer. Without fertilizer, without pesticide, they won\u2019t grow so well. So in order to have such a large bio-based raw material, we also need assistance from petrochemical products.\u201d<\/p>\n

A trip to an organic grocery store offered Cassidy a reality check. \u201cMany of the fruits and vegetables are sealed behind layers of plastic. The issue is that single use plastic is so cheap. That\u2019s why people started to overuse or abuse it, so we no longer reuse and recycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cBio-based material can be two or three times more expensive. And then if you look very carefully, they are also using petrochemical products in their making. In order for material to stand the moisture, the oxygen environment, so you can preserve the food for long enough, they have to mix with some of the petrochemical product.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chen said our dependence on petrochemicals isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing. \u201cIn the next five or 10 years\u2019 time, there will be a dramatic shift of how the world is using petrochemical products,\u201d he says. \u201cWe can see the shift, which is a shift to more electrical-powered solutions, EVs, trains, and maybe in the future airplanes. Because electricity, you cannot just generate from the petrochemical, you can also generate it from solar, from wind, from many, many renewable sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cassidy says she wrote her report on a day spent avoiding fossil fuel with a pencil on ordinary paper. Then she gave it to a colleague to transcribe into digital format.<\/p>\n

Fossil Fuel Supply & Demand<\/p>\n

That focus on affordability is just the hook we need to transition to a discussion between economist Paul Krugman<\/a> and Greg Sargent, the host of The Daily Blast from The New Republic. As an economist, Krugman is intimately acquainted with how changes in supply and demand affect price. With regard to the current fossil fuel situation in the Strait of Hormuz, he said:<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the price of oil is way up, consumption of oil is only down a little bit. And mostly what\u2019s happening is that they\u2019re drawing down inventories of oil, that people who have oil in storage tanks, with oil that was already on tankers, is being used up, which is all happening out of the belief that the strait will reopen soon and prices will come down. As people start to realize that that\u2019s not about to happen \u2014 which has been happening just over the past couple of days \u2014 then the prices have to go much, much higher [emphasis added].<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, the price of oil has to go high enough to inflict enough economic damage \u2014 we have to somehow or other stop, reduce the consumption of oil by another 11 million barrels a day. Convenient thing is that right now, world oil consumption is about 100 million a day. So that\u2019s also about 11 percent. And it takes a huge price increase to do that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not easy to wean yourself off oil in a matter of weeks, which is what we\u2019re kind of expecting has to happen. So this can get much \u2014 it\u2019s ugly already. It\u2019s ugly politically, obviously, for Trump and the Republicans to have gas hitting its highest level in four years. But it\u2019s going to get a lot uglier very soon unless Trump swallows his pride and accepts that he actually lost this war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeing The Inevitable<\/p>\n

Krugman knows how economies work and he can see what is coming our way with a clarity that few can match. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain amount of oil available, which is less than it was. You can\u2019t burn a barrel of oil that isn\u2019t there. So one way or another, people have to be induced to burn less oil\u2026..In effect nobody decides on it, but what happens is just that the price of oil, there\u2019s bidding for barrels of oil, and the bidding drives the price up until the demand for oil has fallen back in line with the supply.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the thing is, oil is \u2014 inelastic. It\u2019s very hard for people to switch away from oil. Give me five years and we can all be driving electric cars, but next month we can\u2019t. So the prices have to go really, really high to make that big of a dent in oil demand.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Onrushing Calamity<\/p>\n

Do we really need a Nobel Prize winning economist to tell us what comes next? Probably not; it\u2019s as plain as the nose on your face. Krugman says: \u201cThe trouble is that the world has not adapted to 15 percent less oil yet. If the strait stays closed, it will have to. If your forecast about world oil prices does not lead to a severe economic blow to the world economy, your forecast is too low, because there\u2019s no scenario in which we get by with 15 percent less oil that doesn\u2019t involve a global recession.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo if the strait stays closed, one way or another we will have a global recession. I don\u2019t know what oil price that will mean \u2014 $150 a barrel, $200 a barrel. I can do some economic algebra there and try to give you an estimate, but it\u2019s really all over the place. High enough that we have a global recession, because that\u2019s the only way to reduce oil consumption that much that fast.\u201d Bloomberg<\/a> agrees that $200 a barrel oil is a realistic possibility.<\/p>\n

What he is saying is the same as what Caitlin Cassidy wrote \u2014 getting along without products derived from fossil fuels<\/a> is exceedingly difficult. We can take some comfort knowing that a decrease in the supply of methane and oil will hasten the transition to renewables in the energy sector, but renewables don\u2019t make fertilizer<\/a>. Between the climate extremes that every farmer is facing and the antics of a doddering old fool who is still trying to win the approval of his long-dead father, a global shortage of food will inevitably be part of any significant reduction in global oil and methane supplies.<\/p>\n

Buckle up, people; there\u2019s a bumpy ride ahead. The fact that this could have all been avoided if America was not ruled by a cabal of sycophants and lunatics will be cold comfort when the shelves in stores are bare and cars stay parked because the cost of gasoline is so high. Once again, an old adage applies to the people who voted to bring this human offal to power: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it!<\/p>\n

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