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UK and Japan among countries that are considering options but yet to commit warships to blockaded shipping route
Countries including the UK, Japan, China and South Korea have said they are still considering their options but without making commitments after the US president, Donald Trump, urged them to send warships to the strait of Hormuz to secure the vital shipping route.
The effective closure of the strait of Hormuz by Tehran, in retaliation for airstrikes by the US and Israel, has proved catastrophic for global energy and trade flows, causing the largest oil supply disruption in history and soaring global oil prices.
However, the international response to Trump’s call for the dispatch of warships has so far proved vague and reluctant, with countries unwilling to commit to a military response that could prove treacherous for their navies.
Yes, please describe plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, air travel, sea transport with solar panels.
The “garbage oil” is what allows 8 billion people to exist. It’s what gave you everything that surrounds you.
Makes it even more important that we should stop burning that stuff and using it for more useful things
I understand, but you need to understand that the type of civilization that will result from that will be drastically different than the party humanity had during the cheap energy stage. You think housing and food are expensive now? Ho boy!
Also, your kids won’t be electrical engineers, but farriers and carpenters.
This is false. It is a cheaper energy future with more resilience and less reason for war (profiteering for stategic scarcity). Hydrogen-solar economy is cheaper than adding new fossil fuels, and so transitioning away the most economic path, before worrying about the expense of reversing climate damage. That incumbent energy loses in transition as demand fades for their climate terrorism should not be part of equation.
But his great great grand-children will be able to grow crops and feed themselves. Your geat great grand-children will be Mad-Maxing it across a desert for clean drinking water. Either way, everything is about to change.
Yes, what’s going to change is that sustainable energy is what powered humanity all the way up to roughly the 19th century.
There’s no going around that.
If you take out of the equation all the oil burned in engines, Hormuz becomes less relevant. And there are already electric buses, tractors, trucks and soon cargo ships.
We can synthesize fuels and plastics. There have been days in Germany where the price of electricity was negative because renewables were producing so much.
We could do it, if we wanted to.
Fossil fuels are mainly used here as a carbon source. Plants contain carbon captured from atmospheric CO₂.
Convert biomass into platform chemicals
Bio-polyethylene
PLA plastics
Create synthetic hydrocarbons Using hydrogen + captured CO₂:
produce methanol
convert to olefins
Most pharmaceuticals rely on organic chemistry
The key fertilizer is ammonia so use green hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
Synthetic jet fuel (Power-to-Liquid) or Biofuels (SAF)
Ammonia fuel
Methanol fuel
Hydrogen fuel cells
Wind-assisted propulsion
Use hydrogen reduction of iron ore:
electric kilns
hydrogen heat
carbon capture
None of these technologies violate physics or chemistry. The challenge is cost, scale, and infrastructure, not feasibility.
If oil is at $200/barrel then these alternatives become much more attractive