[immmmmm]

> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil

I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.

[godwinson__4-8]

This is the same company whose research funding was among the first to produce forecasts of these affects. Yet that didn't stop them.

Can't get more "dark" than that.

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

[immmmmm]

Oh yes, they had some of the best climate scientists back then.

It’s somewhat a scale up of what the tobacco industry did, same strategies, etc

[chicken-stew]

  of what the tobacco industry did

They’re still very active, pushing new avenues that are (pinky swear) not detrimental for your health.

[MengerSponge]

They care about rheology because that expertise enables fracking, and they're smart enough to understand that you have to fund basic science to get (valuable) applied science.

[immmmmm]

I have worked half of my life in both fundamental and applied science, I know how this work. In particular you can refuse jobs you deem unethical.

Why not funding energy transition research for instance. It’s know to science for half a century we’ll cook to death if we don’t phase out fossil fuel energy.

And by know, I mean there’s literally millions of papers on the topic.

[HPsquared]

For my own small country, I'd rather we worked on how to adapt ourselves to the inevitable climate change that is coming, which we can't stop.

[immmmmm]

Adaptation is not an alternative for mitigation. We have to do adaptation AND mitigation (drastic reduction of emissions).

We can stop CC, science is very clear on this.

[dzhiurgis]

The disease is consumerism, not industry. As long as there is demand - there will be supply. AFAIK no people weaned themselves off fossil fuels yet. Even basics haven’t been solved yet in most parts.

[mjevans]

At scale that is never going to happen.

Stop even thinking of conservation, start thinking of how to produce the desired effects using alternate sources and then apply regulation to move to those sources.

Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, nuclear of any sort that's safer than coal or oil? Build it ALL.

Inexpensive energy is the cornerstone of advancing quality of life.

[thorncorona]

well unless you figure out how to replace plastic..

[autoexec]

We could replace a large number of plastics right now and be just fine. Society flourished and thrived before we used plastic for everything in our lives. Some people would make less profit though, so of course it's impossible to make those kinds of changes, but we could.

[kulahan]

Society flourished without lots of stuff we have today. It just flourished less.

And people aren’t failing to migrate away from plastic because “somebody would make less money”, they’re using plastic because everything else basically sucks in comparison. It’s tough, cheap, light, stable, easy to shape, doesn’t often break dangerously, can have all of its basic properties modified, and more. Nothing else is THAT good.

Edit: Not to mention, it’s not as simple as “don’t use plastic packaging anymore”. We pull oil into a machine and cook it off at various stages to produce various things. Turning cooking stage 8 of 12 into a worthless pile of garbage to be discarded doesn’t stop us from pulling in that oil for the other 11 uses.

[Asmod4n]

All we need to do is to replace all plastics with bio degradable ones. But I guess that will take some time since we don’t have replacements for all petroleum based plastics yet.

Hopefully this will get us recycling friendly plastics for foods in the long run since those just get burned nowadays cause you can’t recycle those we have today for that job.

[kulahan]

I’m not sure that simply replacing one type of crude oil byproduct with something else does much on its own, since they still need all the other products produced before and after plastics are made.

[nervousvarun]

Agreed but for it to happen implies altruistic, non-profit based corporate decision making R&D & subsequent manufacturing etc.

No doubt the innumerable shareholder overlords out there who place the basic good of humanity over profit are pushing for it as we speak!

[kulahan]

It sucks you’re the only person on earth who is altruistic enough for this thing that would definitely work but you’re choosing not to enact it despite it being so easy it’s a simple choice.

Because your statement sure leaves exactly zero room for anything else. Kind of a stupid comment at the end of the day. Either that, or you’re such an incredible jerk that you’re specifically choosing not to make these very easy changes that would save the world.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Waxed paper was fine for a lot of food wrappers until the penny pinchers abandoned it.

[kulahan]

I don’t think wax paper is the dividing line between climate change and a happy planet, if I’m being honest

[computomatic]

Well, the mainstream adoption of plastics following World War II happens to coincide with an unprecedented period of relative global stability known as the “Long Peace.” So there’s at least some version of “thriving” that was, in fact, not previously achieved. Correlation does not imply causation but in this case it’s difficult to disentangle which innovations have lead to the relative global prosperity that has enabled this, and I think plastics are on the shortlist.

[ozlikethewizard]

The classic US take on global peace, ask the Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, etc, how they feel about the long peace?

Moreover, pretty sure it was nuclear weapons, not plastic, that stopped the imperial powers from directly attacking one another.

[fodkodrasz]

You are mistaking plastics for the MAD doctrine, and nuclear weapons.