Climate

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.

Some ships would carry ammonia, hydrogen, etc.

Still better than the status quo.

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.

Also, the top energy reserves by company in the world are 5 Chinese silicon producers. 17 m² of high-efficiency solar panels (approx. 100-200 kg total) can produce the same amount of electricity in a year as one barrel of oil (135kg), and they will continue producing for 25+ years.

In these times, having solar is immunity from geopolitical extortion that applies to those dependent on feeding dinosaurs into their energy furnaces.

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.

...and that would drop the amount of marine fuel needed. Compound interest.

And if you could build and maintain renewable infrastructure without fossil fuels while generating an order of magnitude energy excess that'd be nice.

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.

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! 🦅💪🎇

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.

🤫pssst,
this is one of the reasons fossil isn’t replaced as fast as it could and should be

Inb4

Please think of the Poor Freight Captains and tHe eCoNoMy

40 % of ships should probably be decomissioned anyway.

Some of it is metallurgical coal..but yeah, big drop will happen eventually

And the ships themselves are of course powered by fossil fuels.

I wonder how much of that oil is just used to send planes flying.

Yeah but that means shipping company profits get cut almost in half and we can't let that happen now can we?

Do you have a source?

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