Right now China is meeting all of its increasing energy demand by building more renewables (in fact more than rest of the world combined). Their citizen buy electric vehicles at a record rate. Yet I don't see Chinese people starving.
Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels is what has the potential to cause a mass starvation, not getting rid of oil where possible. It should be also noted that all fossil fuel is just sun's energy stored in another form, although I can understand some of you Americans may think it was magically created by a god. Why not use that sun's energy directly wherever possible?
There will be no need for fossil fuels in energy generation and transporting stuff. Whatever use cases remain are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and many of those have alternatives too.
That's a lightweight comment given multiple things can be true.
The claim you are responding to is contempory, "Right now China is", and concerns "its increasing energy demand" .. a response about total existing use twelve years past is no rebuttal.
and maybe recommend diving into the ongoing series of IEA global energy generation and consumption reports.
China's coal consumption is for a purpose, it has a projected wind down, and it represents not just the per capita coal consumption of China's people but also the coal consumption of the world that avails itself of China's solar panel and battery technology.
With a small amount of effort you can create a better comment.
None. The point is not to shut off oil as a energy source instantly before alternatives exist. We should quickly move off of oil as a fuel/energy and build out alternatives as we go (as we are in most parts of the world). Using solar/nuclear/wind for energy does not mean people suddenly start starving. This may surprise you, but your food will be just as nutritious even if it was not delivered to you by burning oil products.
Keep the oil infrastructure for petrochemicals which cannot be easily replaced in the near term.
The point being made is that nobody needs to starve.
Pesticides and fertiliser may be derived from fossil oils and methane, that doesn't mean a single drop has to be burned in the engine of the combine harvester or the tractor.
The US throws away between 30–40% of its food supply.
The US has policies that are outright hostile to mass-transit.
The US has policies that produce some of the ugliest and grossly inefficient suburban environments that have ever existed.
Sure, oil is a critical part of modern civilization, but we could still have modern civilization, and a hell of a better one at that with better policies that end up using far less oil.
> The US throws away between 30–40% of its food supply.
Not just the US, sadly. One of the reasons they do it is: transportation costs, and to avoid the attraction of the homeless as it is "bad for business" ("makes us look bad").
Beyond that, there is also a good reason: farm output is variable, so a systematic policy of aiming for over-production means people don't starve in the years with bad harvests.
buffers in the supply chain don't account for the wastage that goes on in western countries where people let food go bad in their fridge, or farms / grocers throw away cosmetically imperfect food.
This doesn't even get into the gross inefficiency of overweight/obesity where people consume extra calories that make them gain weight which requires them to consume extra calories to carry their surplus weight around, or the amount of energy that is expended just to move them around in automobiles because they can't walk or bike even moderately short distances.
There's a lot of wastage in how we produce and consume food.
Given that we have a policy of over-production, in good years we can easily afford to waste food like that — it's not like we were otherwise either going to eat it all (because developed nations already have an obesity problem in aggregate) or actually donate any significant part of it to good causes (though we could and I'd say we should, even if it's local rather than international e.g. the UK where there's a shockingly large number of people needing to use food banks while also having an overproduction policy).
