Some folks in parts of the world are very reliant on gasoline, while some are more dependent on electric. Petroleum based products however are still in absurd demand by almost all parties. How do you stand to fair if the oil situation continues to worsen? Plastics. Nylon. Jet fuel. Tires. Asphalt. To name just a few things that heavily rely on oil byproduct.

I like to eat food, so pretty dependent.

Even though my small regenerative farm doesn't use much outside of a few tool parts, all food I can't grow myself or find growing within my community is insanely dependent on petroleum products. Especially when it comes to local mom and pop restaurants (to say nothing of the chain restaurants and grocery stores.)

You'd be surprised at how much everything relies on oil.

Nearly every plastic. Every circuit board. Pick something, and part of it is made from oil.

Solar panels. Windmills.

People act like energy is the only thing reliant on oil.

Butane gas kitchen stove, while most people use electric stoves around here. The thing is, I use one 12Kg cylinder per year, that's about 15€.

Yeah, food is still often shipped with petroleum based products even if they aren't used in the product itself directly. I'm not even talking about the plastic in the boxes or bags as much as the tires on the trucks, the diesel in their tanks, the asphalt they drive on, as they criss-cross the country delivering food.

I mean a lot of it is more foisted on. If oil products get to where we go to the older alternatives that is something I would cheer for.

I mean, Ted Kaczynski's actions were deplorable and unconscionable, but he wasn't altogether wrong that to actually be able to make your critique of the system matter you had to be willing to build your own self-reliant systems and stop relying on a system that's oppressing you while you participate in it.

He was too isolationist of an individual to understand that to have those self-reliant systems you have to build them with other people, organize with other people, you know, Mutual Aid. He disconnected from the system by himself and instead of building alternatives to the system he decided he'd rather bomb the system. I think making alternatives to the system makes more sense, personally, and has had a history of great success for example with the Black Panthers which were roundly vilified but were actually a mutual aid society that relied on building parallel systems for people who were excluded from the systems that existed that favored white people and disfavored minority groups.

It's true, on some level you must find a way to disconnect and to begin to build our own solutions moving forward, which is how governance naturally organizes anyway. Governance from the bottom up always works better than from the top down.

It's just waiting on other people to figure out that we don't all have to be in this alone, we can actually be in it together.

Can we escape certain aspects of our system entirely? No, but we can continue to do our collective best to minimize our overall impact in re-enforcing the broken aspects of our society through building parallel systems when and where we can.

This is what was wierd to me about the oil opposition to solar. return per barrel keeps on dropping and things like wind and solar just bring back the return energy wise. Why didn't they just invest in it?

I can happily say that my daily transportation is mostly divorced from petroleum products: the local buses are electric, and I don’t own a car. It still needs tires and had plastic in it obviously, but no gasoline is a big plus.

I try to buy as little plastic as possible, but I don’t control what they put the food I buy in, and my budget is restricted enough that I can’t spend extra to find plastic-free options most of the time (even bulk produce is bagged/in a container usually). I think it’s for hygiene purposes, but I’d be fine with prepared foods being in a paper bag or cardboard or something and produce being loose.

For stuff I regularly use, I try to buy a version that isn’t made of plastic whenever possible. My lunch box and water bottle are plastic free and stainless steel, so I expect them to last basically forever. Our cat’s litter box is also stainless steel, because the plastic ones eventually either get clawed to shit or worn away from continual ammonia exposure.

If this oil crisis made companies more thoroughly investigate plastic alternatives, that’d be great, but I get the feeling they’re just shrugging and passing the cost on to us.

Even though I take an electric bike or electric buses and metros to get to work so I don't need to burn it to go anywhere myself, but I know that lots of fuel is burned to get stuff to me, from farms and source industries, to processors, to the store.

I do like to travel internationally a few times a year so that really ups my personal carbon footprint and I do expect to get more expensive year-over-year and I may end up going less in the future.

In BC, flexible plastics are recyclable, and I'd even had my prior assumptions challenged by people on Lemmy that virgin plastics formed with by-products of petroleum fuel production (esters) would be too cheap and abundant for recycled plastics to be economical; the oil shock highlights how that may not always be the case.

We'll need a bit of petroleum for lubrication (machine oil), cooling, jet fuel, a bit gor plastic etc., but we can, even today, replace a good chunk of it relatively quickly and reduce methane and CO2 emissions enough to make a difference and to ride out a shock like this. Synthetic glue took over the need to use animal products for all but the smallest niche of artisans. If electric vehicles, better mass transport, SAF, grid batteries are pushed for mass implementation, our dependence on oil can be massively reduced. Ironically, the biggest oil shills of the world have done more than any environmental activist could hope to accomplish, to show people why complete dependence on oil and fossil fuel is bad.

🎶And every circuit board, all the plastic and foil
People act like only energy is reliant on oil

and thaaaaaat is how the world works, that's how the world works! 🎶

That and fertilizer. Big ag relies on the stuff.

Our clothes are part plastic as well. Its crazy how much.

They did, to some degree. But usually new players are better at capitalizing on emerging technologies. Kodak did invest in digital photography, and Nokia in smartphones, to give some examples.

Shell had a solar division which they sold in 2006. (It has since taken some stakes in solar and wind projects.)

To be fair, for most of the applications of oil it's not so much that it "relies" on oil, just that it's the cheaper method (for now).

You can make a plastic bag starting from water and carbon dioxide (or some other source of carbon), plus electricity.

Mmm, carbon monoxide flavour.

Edit: Downvote if you or someone you love has brain damage from chronic exposure 🥴 1 vote = 1 real safe stove for those in need

We have an EV, so in some ways we rely on it less than others. However, we have oil powered heating so yeah, still depends on it.

Nearly totally.

Food: The farmers probably aren't using electric tractors. The trucks that bring them their inputs and their produce to the store are probably not electric. The power company keeping the store's fridges running are, even if they were totally renewables-focused, using oil for something.

Water: plastic pipes are everywhere in modern construction.

Housing: plastic parts, sealants, lubricants, power supply, etc.

Computing: filled with petroleum products and built using carbon energy

Change hasn't really happened yet on the scale where it can decarbonise the general population.

Im probably going to get in good shape from all the bicycle riding.

Edit: Some thoughts about oil as fuel vs oil as a base material for various things.

A gallon of gas gets me all the way to work. Thankfully I have an EV! But wait! The EV still needs oil! And tires! And plastic!

There is a sense of scale missing here. As mentioned, if I were to drive my gas car, I turn two gallons of designer hydrocarbons into heat and motion every day. And then I change the oil every 5,000 miles or so. Gallons and gallons of destroyed or contaminated hydrocarbons every year.

An EV has oil in a gearbox somewhere typically. In my case, its 1.5 quarts of transmission fluid, and it only needs to be changed every 60,000 miles. The tires last 40,000-60,000 miles. The plastic lasts until a shopping cart hits it. It isn't gallons and gallons of stuff a year.

The difference is, the windmills and solar panels and such are in use a lot longer than a tank of gas.

Everything I've got, everything I eat, is transported by trucks using diesel for at least 300km.

Steel is also very reliant on coal and oil still, until a few years ago I'm now aware of and carbon neutral steel.

At least I've got cheap hydroelectric power nearby.

it's a paradox, the more we use the more we loose

When cli. sci. says we have to be off fossil fuels, everyone just yawns and says too inconvenient.. but that's a choice that leads us to the collapse of civilization.

Most of Australia's logistics and transport runs on diesel trucks. Everything I can see in my house right now has been in a truck at some point.

Hydroelectric need oil for turbine?

Probably, but in vanishing small quantities in comparison.

your car, computer parts. medical equipment especially disposable ones you need to replace. syringes, lances, injectors for medication. bandaid/ adhesives,,,etc.

Most goods in the world being transported by ships and trucks using oil based fuel.

Synthetic oil (non-petroleum) was one of the first widespread commercial/industrial substitutes for petroleum. Most automobiles are already using synthetic oil. I can't say I know the exact formulation hydro turbines use, but I would guess a petroleum free version could be made with today's technology if it doesn't exist already.

Oh so when I get full synthetic oil in my vehicle that is not at all petroleum based? That's completely from a lab? Or however they are made?

I think I need to zoom out a bit to explain. We talk about "oil" but what we're really talking about is just hydrocarbons. Take a look at this diagram:

The only difference in the many forms is how the hydrogen and carbon chains are ordered. Add or subtract a few and it becomes a different substance with a different name. We can technically make hydrocarbons from atmospheric air. This includes methane and even gasoline can be made from the air surrounding us. We don't do this because its expensive and pulling petroleum from the ground has most of the work done for us.

So to answer your first question: Most of the hydrogen and carbon in the synthetic oil in your car today probably came from petroleum, but that petroleum was broken down into raw carbon and hydrogen, then the oil molecules were built into motor oil.

Petroleum became too expensive, we'd use different sources besides petroleum for carbon and hydrogen input needs.

Interesting. This is past my chemical studies in school but very interesting. How would it work? Like If I can get it out of the air, does it mean we will have an air scarcity problem in the future?

The Law of Conservation: nothing can be created or destroyed. When you burn oil it doesn't disappear, it changes form. You're turning it into CO2 and H2O. The carbon goes into CO2. The hydrogen goes int H2O.