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US to Cancel Billions for West Coast Hydrogen Hubs Amid Shutdown
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Not even close. Even if all cars were eliminated, there will still be enormous commercial need for fuels, such as commercial trucking, shipping, aviation, mining, construction, etc. Not to mention that growing crops for biodiesel require massive energy inputs in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment, etc. And of course, the farmland needed will displace food production, which is its own major problem.
Which is why biofuels can never really be taken seriously as part of a green economy.
Sure, same here.
Mostly unnecessary; that's what freight trains are for. (Short-haul from freight depot to loading dock can be handled by battery electric trucks.)
Believe it or not, sails! Obviously you're not going to get a 100% reduction because modern shipping companies wouldn't tolerate being becalmed (and I'm not falling for that article's "up to 90%" claim either, BTW -- I only picked that one to link because it has a decent overview of multiple different technologies), but it can still make a big dent in the fuel requirements.
Not much you can do about how much fuel a given flight uses... but you can reduce the number of flights by shifting travelers to high-speed passenger rail instead.
In other words, stuff that doesn't actually go anywhere (instead just driving back and forth on a site that probably has good access to the grid or a generator), which means it's (comparatively) real easy to electrify.
Who said anything about that? I was talking about waste veggie oil.
I'm not sure you fully appreciate how large a reduction in automobile/trucking/shipping/construction equipment fuel use I'm proposing. I'm saying we should electrify or modal-shift so much of the demand that biodiesel made from just the stuff thrown out by restaurants and meat-packing plants and whatnot -- without even growing bespoke crops for it -- could satisfy most of what remains.
No. Absolutely not. Sorry, but I cannot this claim seriously at all. We are not going to switch to sail ships again. I don't think you grasp just how big modern shipping actually is, and how impossible such an idea really is.
I doubt you have any grasp of how massive the problem really is, and how tiny your proposed solutions are in comparison. For instance, you keep citing the possibility of using waste cooking oil for biofuels. Well, the world only makes 3.7 billion gallons of that per year: https://oilandenergyonline.com/articles/all/supply-and-demand-report-used-cooking-oil/
Converted to barrels of oil equivalence, that's around 100 million barrels. The problem? That's literally one day's worth of petroleum consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption
So you are about 0.3% of the way of solving the problem with that idea. Even if we could radically reduce petroleum use in the way you are imagining, that's still going to be a negligible impact. And the world's GDP is still growing. There's still multiple billions of people that will want to live like the first world. So demand for energy will skyrocket in the coming decades, not decrease. The problem will only get exponentially larger and harder to solve.
Ultimately, this is eco-Ludditism, and is more about wishing away the problem than actually solving it. Worse, you enabling the worse stereotypes about environmentalists. Namely that they are crazy wackos who aren't willing to engage with reality. Any solution must take seriously the idea that there >8 billion people on Earth now, and they all want to live in convenience.
I'm hopeful for wind powered shipping. An abundant H2 supply would accelerate this https://youtu.be/HFIzcPBGGEQ (1.2mw high altitude turbine thethered to large ship) that can scale even higher.