[minerjoe]

In some just universe, oil == pure evil. It's underground for a reason and poking a million painful needles into Mother Earth to suck it out and spew it into every biome is bound to have implications on our own health.

As above, so below.

[mr_toad]

It’s underground because anaerobic decay of organic material with heat and pressure produces oil. Chemicals aren’t inherently good or evil. Some, like oxygen, we’ve evolved to live with, while some we haven’t had the chance.

In millions of years something will probably evolve to eat all this plastic, just like it did with cellulose.

[eru]

Oxygen originally killed off most of the biosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

[mey]

Oil has horrible consequences, but your rational for it being evil by being out of "reach" isn't very enlightening. By your logic we should not tap aquifers for drinking water, but mass desalination is fine. Instead, oil is bad because. It's not renewable, it's refinement/combustion is readily linked to cancer and other deadly/health issues, extraction/transport routinely kills ecosystems/creates toxic waste sites.

[na85]

Mass desalination via solar energy seems like it would be a huge win for the environment. Plus you could sell the salt.

I wonder if it's feasible.

[ggm]

Desal plants cause localised brine concentration and screw ecology. If you built them at Salinas (salt pans) maybe that would be ok, and we'd get more flamingoes once the brine shrimp population rose. So you need strong solar and large flat expanses. North Africa? There was a serious proposal to sell solar power to Europe from north Africa. Maybe this is the triple play?

[Gibbon1]

I've looked at Desalination in Southern California. One thing they're trying is to mix the saline water with waste water discharge. One assumes that's better. Other thing I found when poking about is the energy expenditure for some of LA's water sources is close to that of desalination.

I think I'm firmly down on the side of I'm against desalination if it just means more water for almonds. For desalination if it means replacing expensive imported water sources and leaving more water for what's left of the states natural environment.

I feel like things are complicated with a inescapable level of fucked.

[pas]

Carbon tax (or a similar, more general environmental impact tax) would sort thing out in no time.

It wouldn't matter if someone uses water to raise almonds in the middle of the desert, but it should have its env. impact priced in.

Similarly, it's absolutely ridiculous that large states can't plan ahead for ~20-50 years and instead of building efficient power plants we're stuck with windmills and solar and batteries as the "green" option.

[carapace]

> we should not tap aquifers for drinking water

We shouldn't tap aquifers.

https://ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/central-valley/images/sub...

[SamReidHughes]

Oil was bubbling to the surface of the Earth before we harvested the stuff that was easy to get at.

Not that microplastics are okay -- they're my biggest environmental concern -- but oil itself is "natural".

[danans]

> but oil itself is "natural".

Burning it in mass quantities, is not so "natural", unless you go down the rabbit hole of calling all human activities "natural".

[tasuki]

Is there any reason not to go down that rabbit hole? How do we distinguish natural from unnatural?

[danans]

> How do we distinguish natural from unnatural?

I can think of a few ways to answer that question.

One is whether or not the material can be re-consumed or otherwise recycled and isolated from broader ecosystem damage by non human-designed biological or physical processes. Petroleum derived plastics don't fit that definition (yes I know that every few years there is a "breakthrough" plastic-eating microbe engineered or discovered, but it hasn't really dealt with the scale of the current problem). Curiously CO2 is "natural" by this definition (plants consume it), but unfortunately not anywhere near the rate needed to remove how much of it humans put into the atmosphere.

The other is that consumed material is "natural" if there is a near-term counter process, either pre-existent or emergent, that will shut down the "natural" process. For example, overgrazing by wild ruminant herds in an area will result in a population explosion, which will eventually result in population reduction either via starvation or predation. We know that the overgrazing by wild ruminants is a "natural" occurrence because the ecosystem has evolved counter measures. In the case of humans burning petroleum, there is no natural counter-measure.

Then again, perhaps climate-change and the resulting social upheavals will be exactly that. It's too early to know whether humans are going to be able to dodge the impact of that, or if climate change is to us as the disappearing pasture is to the wild ruminants.

[SamReidHughes]

Plastic isn't burning it.

[danans]

From: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/hamman1/#:~:tex....

"non-feedstock energy [for plastic production is] (between 1.4 x 1018 J and 2.2 x 1018 J)". Non-feedstock means the stuff that doesn't turn into plastic, but just powers the product. From the same paper, adding both feedstock and non-feedstock together:

"between 2.5% and 4.0% of total U.S. primary energy consumption in 2008 was due to the energy for plastic."

Also, plastics are a fossil fuel, and a lot of waste plastic is burned for energy production, which results in significant fossil-fuel based CO2 emissions.

[dungdongdang]

Things are not evil or good. They do not give birth, because they are things. A chair does not feel pain because it's not a person.

You seem to think nature is a person, with a purpose, and designs things for that purpose. There is a christian unintelligent design subreddit for that. I believe this site is for technical and scientific discussion.

Now, let's start a nice healthy 5-page discussion about appropriate harshness of tone, ending with a shadowban of the IP of this hilton hotel.