The biggest WTF moment of my life was when I found out plastic was made from fossil fuels
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I had no idea, never thought about it before. I learned about it in a college geology class and it just blew my mind.
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amazing; i have no real bearing on what fraction of fossil fuels go to plastics and i know there's been a lot of work around making it out of biomatter (but obviously it's way more expensive/crappier quality or it'd all be made out of algae or mushrooms or whatever by now)
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As fossil fuels (oil in particular) are phased out of energy uses (cars, home heating, etc), the industry is going to ramp up plastic production as a way to continue to make money. The shift has already started.
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that makes sense; i haven't been tracking it. who's the person to follow for that?
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It doesn’t really. Crude alone is $5t a year not counting further refining etc. Plastics is $600b, an order of magnitude less and no longer growth. Nobody thinks materials $ will make up for lost energy $, and there’s as much pressure on decarbonizing materials as energy.
There’s other moving parts too… like natural gas —> ammonia —> fertilizer which are probably more important than plastics. And lots of other materials and industrial materials. Whole thing is super complex. Recommend and newsletters for the play-by-play
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O&G is doing some mix of straight up a) fighting decarbonization b) redeploying harvested capital in renewables c) looking for taxpayer compensation for stranded assets that will never be extracted but are in the stock price
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