It’s not just about energy, but also industrial (think neon, helium) and agricultural inputs (nitrogen, urea). Even if energy was solved, there’s not really replacements for these. Well, regenerative agriculture but not sure that will feed as many people.
The nitrogen comes from the air - we're perfectly capable of capturing it using renewables.
It's probably one of the last things to be created that way because it's one of the places where methane is used more efficiently than burning it... But fundamentally there's no issue here except energy availability and a short term supply shock.
This is false, you can make many plastics without fossil sources (pla, bio-pet, bio-abs, etc). The only challenge is cost and scale - it's cheaper and easier to use existing processes.
But making plastics using renewable energy and fossil hydrocarbons for feedstock does not exacerbate the greenhouse effect, unless you burn them when you've finished with them.
Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.
Is there enough cellulose available to keep Temu fully stocked? Now and in the near future. And aren’t you going to get agricultural land out of the equation in order to have space for that cellulose-planting industry? And in so doing increasing the price of basic food.
