[qwerty_clicks]

I’ve worked for two refining companies. They aren’t about to rebuild their global infrastructure to make this happen…it doesn’t matter what possible, it’s what corporations can buy out politicians and the rich building a society that benefits them.

[insane_dreamer]

When you start to look at a lot of technological solutions to problems like environmental pollution, climate change, low-cost energy, healthy food production and distribution, you realize that most of the challenges are not technological in nature, but social and political -- basically human nature (fear and greed).

(This is another reason why the idea that's been floated that "AI" or the near-mythical "AGI" will "solve the world's problems" is fallacy -- unless of course by "solve" it means "make a few companies extremely wealthy at the expense of everyone else".)

[taminka]

when you're inside the machine, it's hard to see how it could work differently

[samrus]

You could have said that about motor cars. That the horse industry wasnt going to give up that easy. Its all about incentives

Having said that, deep sustainability initiatives like this require some forward thinking, and i dont see the public buying into preserving their own future when the reaction to climate protesters is eye rolling and the west and east keep throwing the hot potato of blame to each other rather than trying ti solve the problem.

Ideally, the government would introduce regulations to incentivize this for entities for whome the value proposition would, in the short term, be negative. But i dont know if they'll get their act together to do that. So you might be right

[IAmBroom]

There never existed a "refinery" that produced whatever the equivalent of "50 million barrels of crude oil a day" in horses is. "Big Horse" never existed; it was massively decentralized, even when sold at large annual livestock events.