Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.
It’s way more than cars. Plastics, chemicals, energy, shipping, fertilizers, pesticides, even food additives can trace their ingredients to oil and gas. We’ve structured our whole society around oil since World War I, and getting out of it isn’t going to be easy.
A lot of it, is due to having waste products from refining crude oil, which could be turned into something usefull. So when you transition away from combustion engine cars, you increase the costs of other oil based products.
Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though
The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy... no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.
Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn't important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?