And more unemployed seamen’s.

Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.

Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.

Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.

More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields

did you read the whole comment? alexander already stated that

Bypassing the question of whether sugars and oils are edible (?), field corn is perfectly edible for humans. Field corn isn’t sweet corn, and doesn’t taste good as a vegetable. But we can eat it the same way most people throughout history have eaten corn - as a staple crop, as a grain like wheat, as corn flour, cornmeal, grits, parched corn, hominy, maza, etc, etc. We just choose not to.

And calling opposition to ethanol “oil and gas propaganda” is ridiculous. Like the comment you responded to point it out, ethanol is sold mixed with gasoline. The industries are synergistic, not competitive. They have a common interest in promoting internal combustion engine vehicles and opposing EVs.

Most of the corn grown in the US is not edible. Barely 1.5%. Most of it is grown for sugars, oils and other industrial processes.

not actually true. This is oil and sugar propaganda.

Most of the corn grown in the US is grass. 100% of it, in fact. Soybeans make up a large percentage of animal feed.

I laughed.

And set up a bottle deposit and return system that only needs to function at a local level. Haha, the solution to one of the big problems I saw with using glass instead of plastics for packaging. Just don’t ship it that way, ship it at scale dry in a paper container that collapses to nothing for the return trip, or holds some other good going back.

1000% this. I’ve been trying to get my household switched over to dry detergents whenever possible. I simply hate the idea of shipping water around, since it is bulky, heavy, and makes up like 70-90% of most household cleaners.

Could also reduce the shipping needed on these by requiring standard container shapes that can properly be emptied. So many consumer product containers, even food containers, are designed so it is difficult to fully use the product. Companies see it as an uptick in sales because you’ll be buying that soap/ketchup/whatever more frequently since you can’t use 4 ounces out of the bottom, rather than seeing the cost-savings of not shipping 4oz x thousands of containers of weight pointlessly. (Personally, I go out of my way to empty every container fully, but many see it as a waste of effort.)

Never said unsolvable by any means, but they need to be solved yesterday. Blows the mind too, for all those capitalism-minded people, they have all this untapped “wealth” they could be getting into on the ground floor instead of clinging to oil.

They’re not problems that need to be solved. If we cut fossil fuel use by 90%, there’s hardly any impact on these uses.

Asphalt for pavement and shingles is amaong the most recycled materials on the planet.

Not how you think. The asphalt is ground up for the mineral content then mixed with new bitumen.

Soap and shampoo can be made from animal fat or vegetable oil.

Most of it is. Cheapest way to do it.

Hydrogen can be made from water. You get oxygen too.

By wasting a lot of electricity.

There is indeed propaganda going on, but there is also a reality that many supply chains need conversion, and that money needs to come from somewhere. Not saying it is right, nor that it is unsolvable, just a reality. Most often, the smaller businesses are destroyed by expensive switches to new methods. Which is all we need, more megacorps owning everything.

In a world with functioning governments, processes, grants, tax breaks, and such could be set up to help companies switch.

Whoa, seriously? Okay that’s awesome to know. And pretty cool.

– Frost

They don’t have to be though. We do not need petroleum to make plastics.

Yeah, didn’t want to hit every note. Medical specifically requires a higher tolerance and quality level that makes it more challenging to be replaced with alternatives like bioplastics. For most items, I’d be fine buying them in glass or cans again.

Plastics are a waste product of converting oil to useful fuels. That’s why they’re so cheap and used in the most unbelievably wasteful ways. They’ll remain inextricably linked. Fuel is expensive, plastics are incredibly cheap. If we ban the use of fossil fuels but still rely on oil based plastics, plastics will become very expensive and we’ll still be creating the fuel. We’ll just have a growing supply of worthless energy sitting around and decaying in storage.

I’m not saying it’s a bad idea as I’m not an expert by any means, but to keep plastics for essential uses like in medicine will likely require a heavily subsidized plastic industry at least. But hey we already subsidize the fossil fuel industry directly and by externalizing the planet destroying effects of their use…

Sure, but when a lot of the things don’t need to carry the fuel with them and induction roadways do it all in the moment?

… it’s people!!

Offshore wind and onshore solar excess can be used to produce hydrogen, not coal.

It takes extra steps and introduces inefficiencies, but it is able to store larger amounts of energy than batteries, and can be used in certain industrial processes which do not run on wires and electrons.

In a succesfully electrified world, it is likely that some ammonia and hydrogen is shipped around the world for such use cases. The main alternative is to keep using fossils.

Its sort of happening hard like that but companies are resilient. According to the news, in the Philippines they are asking people to work from home and reduce energy use. It’s a beautiful country but you can see evidence of industry everywhere you go. Candy wrappers and bags on the street, etc etc. In most neighborhoods you see people sweeping like they do in Mexico. But roads, rivers are covered in trash unless they are part of the tourism industry. It much worse in India from what I can tell. So if that is being reduced, hopefully it will just stop happening.