Tag: Plastics

Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz force us to reconsider material benefits of fossil fuels

The crisis doesn’t undermine fossil fuels’ material benefits—it spotlights why they remain indispensable and why pretending otherwise is a luxury we can no longer afford. Pragmatic abundance, not ideological phase-outs, is the path to security and prosperity.

The crisis doesn’t undermine fossil fuels’ material benefits—it spotlights why they remain indispensable and why pretending otherwise is a luxury we can no longer afford. Pragmatic abundance, not ideological phase-outs, is the path to security and prosperity.

From The CO2- Coalition´s Substack

By Ron Stein

Recent calls for a more realistic shift from “decarbonization” to “low carbon” suggest that discomfort with ideology-driven climate policy is finally beginning to surface in public debate. For years, climate discussions in many countries have been dominated by abstract targets, slogans, and numerical commitments. Yet behind these lofty ideals lies a deeper and more practical question:

Have we come to understand energy far too narrowly?

Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026 have made that question impossible to ignore.

Today, under the banner of decarbonization, energy is often treated as if it were synonymous with electricity. Public discussion tends to focus on how to generate electricity without carbon emissions, how quickly electric vehicles can replace conventional cars, or how far renewable electricity from wind turbines and solar panels can expand. These are important questions, but they are not the whole picture. From the perspective of a chemical engineer, reducing the energy debate to electricity alone is equivalent to seeing only half of civilization.

Fossil fuels are not merely inputs for electricity generation. They are also indispensable raw materials for the modern industrial world. In addition to supporting transportation systems, more than 6,000 products that sustain daily life—including clothing, medical equipment, fertilizers, plastics, synthetic fibers, housing materials, detergents, packaging, and countless industrial components—owe their existence to the material benefits of fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas are not simply burned; they are transformed into the feedstocks from which modern life is built.

This distinction is crucial. When policymakers and activists speak as though the problem can be solved simply by replacing fossil-fuel-based power generation with renewable electricity, they overlook the material foundation of modern civilization. Electricity alone cannot replace the petrochemical chains that support medicine, sanitation, food production, logistics, communication devices, transportation, and housing. Even a society that succeeds in electrifying much of its transport and power system would still face the question of how to secure the immense range of materials now derived from fossil resources.

That is why the petrochemical industry deserves far more attention than it usually receives in climate discussions. Fossil-fuel feedstocks are processed into basic petrochemical products such as ethylene and propylene, which then branch out into thousands of derivative products. This vast network of transformation supports not only clothing, food, transportation, and housing, but also the medical and sanitary systems upon which public health depends. In every sense, it forms part of the very fabric of modern civilization.

Once we understand this, it becomes obvious that a disruption in fossil-fuel supply would mean far more than higher gasoline prices or temporary pressure on power generation. If supplies were seriously interrupted, the consequences would reach into nearly every corner of daily life. The clothes we wear, the medicines we take, the smartphones we use, the fertilizers that sustain agriculture, and even the containers and packaging that transport food and medical goods would all be affected by shortages of raw materials.

The modern world is not merely powered by fossil fuels; it is materially structured by them. This is why recent tensions in the Strait of Hormuz have such profound significance.

The issue is not limited to geopolitics, tanker traffic, or fluctuations in energy prices. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most critical chokepoints in the global energy system, and instability there exposes just how vulnerable advanced societies remain. When supply routes are threatened, what is at stake is not only energy security in the narrow sense, but also the continuity of the material systems that sustain ordinary life.

In the spring of 2026, the gap between ideology and reality became visible all at once. Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, together with the stark reminder that some countries, such as Japan, rely on finite imported fossil-fuel supplies measured in days, were not merely statistics.

They were a warning about the fragility of everyday life itself. Numbers like these may appear dry and technical, but behind them lies a simple truth: if supply chains are strained for long enough, the effects will be felt not only in fuel markets but across the full range of goods on which modern society depends.

What had long been obscured under the rhetoric of decarbonization was suddenly illuminated by crisis. The “thickness of civilization” became visible again. By this I mean the dense, interconnected, and often invisible material network that supports human well-being: industrial chemistry, manufacturing, transportation, sanitation, communications, healthcare, agriculture, and construction. These are not marginal or optional features of modern life. They are its substance. And this crisis revealed that more than 6,000 products essential to daily life could be placed at risk at the same time.

None of this means that environmental problems should be ignored, or that societies should abandon efforts to reduce waste, improve efficiency, and pursue cleaner technologies. But it does mean that energy policy must begin from a more honest understanding of reality. A civilization cannot be sustained on slogans. Nor can policymakers responsibly design the future while pretending that fossil fuels are nothing more than a dirty legacy to be discarded. They are also part of the material infrastructure of life as we know it.

The real challenge, therefore, is not to deny this dependence, but to manage it wisely. A mature energy policy should aim not at simplistic moral purity, but at resilience, prudence, and realism. It should ask how societies can preserve the quality of life, maintain stable supply chains, reduce unnecessary waste, and use limited resources intelligently. It should also recognize that technological transition takes time, and that forcing change without regard for material realities can produce shortages, instability, and needless harm.

To face reality is not an act of resignation. On the contrary, it is the most sincere and forward-looking course of action. It means acknowledging the tension between ideals and practical necessity, while continuing to take steady and responsible steps. From that starting point, we can begin to redesign energy policy in a way that is both sustainable and humane—one that respects the environment without forgetting the material foundations of civilization itself.

Originally published in America Out Loud on April 13, 2026.

Ronald Stein, P.E. is a CO2 Coalition engineer, energy consultant, speaker, author of books and articles on energy literacy, environmental policy, and human rights, and Founder of PTS Advance, a California based company.

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UN plastics treaty collapses

The United Nations adjourned its plastics summit in Geneva, Switzerland, with no version of a global treaty coming close to reaching “consensus.”

A modern living room featuring a sleek black TV mounted on a wall, displaying a colorful scene. Below the TV, there is a stylish black media console with an electronic device and decorative items. A grey coffee table with a laptop, a smartphone, and a magazine is in the foreground, surrounded by large windows that let in natural light.

CFACT

A person holding a smartphone in front of a keyboard and a computer screen.
two hand holding smart phone with blank screen

The United Nations adjourned its plastics summit in Geneva, Switzerland, with no version of a global treaty coming close to reaching “consensus.”

This is great news for the global economy, as radical proposals sought to place taxes and controls on every phase of plastic production and use.

The UN plastics summit tried to follow the climate conference script, where launching into late-night overtime is standard. Bleary eyes, however, induced no parties to alter their positions.

Developing nations and the EU were unable to convince manufacturing and petroleum-producing nations to agree on a draft.

The anti-plastics nations attempted to kill production via a death by a thousand cuts strategy, by calling for the elimination of important chemicals used in plastics production. The pro-plastics nations saw through the ploy and blocked it.

Plastics have been a crucial factor in enabling people at every economic level to afford high-quality manufactured goods. They are essential to societal abundance.

The ideal solution is to keep plastic in our economies, but to do a great job at managing recycling and waste. Nations with advanced economies have already made huge strides. The vast majority of plastic pollution in the oceans comes from fishing gear and a few rivers in Asia and Africa. Forbidding the use of plastic straws in Paris or Peoria achieves nothing meaningful to combat this waste.

As CFACT President Craig Rucker recently wrote, “The real tragedy isn’t plastic itself, but the mismanagement of plastic waste—and the regulatory stranglehold that blocks better solutions. In many countries, recycling is a government-run monopoly with little incentive to innovate. Meanwhile, private-sector entrepreneurs working on advanced recycling, biodegradable materials, and AI-powered sorting systems face burdensome red tape and market distortion.”

A new UN regime of taxation, mandates, and bans is not the way to deal with the issues surrounding plastics (or pretty much anything else). Working with developing nations to up their recycling and waste management is the way to go.

Guardian Downgrades the Climate Crisis, Chemical Pollution a “Comparable” Threat

Amazing how many other problems are just as important as the crisis of our time.

Three women sit by a polluted river bank, observing industrial smoke stacks releasing dark smoke into the sky, surrounded by trash and debris in the water.

From Watts Up With That?

By Eric Worrall

Amazing how many other problems are just as important as the crisis of our time.

Chemical pollution a threat comparable to climate change, scientists warn

More than 100 million ‘novel entity’ chemicals are in circulation, with health impact not widely recognised

Damien Gayle Wed 6 Aug 2025 14.00 AEST

Chemical pollution is “a threat to the thriving of humans and nature of a similar order as climate change” but decades behind global heating in terms of public awareness and action, a report has warned.

The industrial economy has created more than 100 million “novel entities”, or chemicals not found in nature, with somewhere between 40,000 and 350,000 in commercial use and production, the report says. But the environmental and human health effects of this widespread contamination of the biosphere are not widely appreciated, in spite of a growing body of evidence linking chemical toxicity with effects ranging from ADHD to infertility to cancer.

“I suppose that’s the biggest surprise for some people,” Harry Macpherson, senior climate associate at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), which carried out the research, told the Guardian.

“Maybe people think that when you walk down the street breathing the air; you drink your water, you eat your food; you use your personal care products, your shampoo, cleaning products for your house, the furniture in your house; a lot of people assume that there’s really great knowledge and huge due diligence on the chemical safety of these things. But it really isn’t the case.”

…

Currently, chemical toxicity as an environmental issue receives just a fraction of the funding that is devoted to climate change, a disproportionality that Macpherson says should change. “We obviously don’t want less funding going into the climate and the atmosphere,” he said. “But this we think – really, proportionally – needs more attention.”

…Read more: 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/06/chemical-pollution-threat-comparable-climate-change-scientists-warn-novel-entities

The report “Toxicity: The Invisible Tsunami” is apparently available here, but as of the time of writing their website was unresponsive.

If this “Invisible Tsunami” of toxic chemicals is having an impact on human health, it is certainly not showing up in any life expectancy graphs I’ve seen.

Line graph depicting global life expectancy trends from 1543 to 2015, showing growth in life expectancy over the centuries.

I’m not suggesting that chemical toxicity is something which should be ignored, there are good reasons why dangerous poisons like Thallium rat bait and Tetra-ethyl lead fuel additives were discontinued. But spending huge money monitoring every imaginable chemical, that money has to come from somewhere. Spending billions of dollars on a wild goose chase, making life less affordable for people who are already struggling, would itself have a substantial large-scale impact on human health.

First warming, then climate, now plastics — energy company lawfare

“Exxon Knew!” The battle cry has inflamed and inspired climate activists for decades. Since the 1970s, they allege, Exxon Knew that human-caused climate change is “real” – but lied about it, claimed there wasn’t a “crisis,” and kept marketing its “planet-killing” fuels and petrochemical feed stocks.

From CFACT

By Paul Driessen

“Exxon Knew!” The battle cry has inflamed and inspired climate activists for decades. Since the 1970s, they allege, Exxon Knew that human-caused climate change is “real” – but lied about it, claimed there wasn’t a “crisis,” and kept marketing its “planet-killing” fuels and petrochemical feed stocks.

Now activists say Exxon Knew for years that very little plastic waste is actually recycled. The oil giant is deceiving regulators and consumers with claims that all plastics are recyclable and its “advanced recycling” processes keep enormous amounts of plastics out of landfills.

ExxonMobil “campaign of deception” demands a lawsuit, says California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Exxon Knew” that 95% of plastics in recycling bins are incinerated, get tossed onto roadways, or end up in landfills and oceans.

“Exxon knew” it was peddling lies when it promoted recycling as a “cure-all for plastic waste” – because eradicating all plastic use and disposal is impossible and many plastics can’t be recycled.

This is Mr. Bonta’s latest attack on fossil fuels. He wants a jury trial, to help ensure big lawfare payouts. But he’s ignoring inconvenient realities and engaging in rampant deceptions of his own.

Plastics are ubiquitous: from eyeglass frames and lenses, to television, computer and cell phone housings, wind turbine blades and nacelles, solar panel frames, medical equipment, devices and garments, car and airplane interiors, backpacks, skis, football helmets, shoes, grocery bags and infinitely more. Plastic packaging preserves and protects products that involve long, expensive, resource-intensive processes to grow or manufacture; it helps keep foods from spoiling or becoming bacteria-infested.

Plastics are cheap to produce, can be molded into infinite shapes and sizes, are corrosion-resistant, and don’t break easily (imagine shampoo and body wash in glass bottles). They’re lighter than glass and even paper alternatives, meaning more can be packed on trucks and transported using less fuel. In many cases, there are no viable alternatives.

Plastics are essential for our living standards, safety and modern world.

But what happens when they break, wear out or get tossed? For years they were thrown out with other trash. But environmentalists, politicians and consumers increasingly demanded that cans, glass and other throwaways be recycled. For many of us, recycling became a habit.

Recycling turns low-value plastic garbage into valuable materials: window frames, boards for siding decks and fences, pipes to replace copper tubing that thieves steal, toys and toothbrushes, plates and utensils, diapers and clothing, carpeting and lawn furniture, soccer fields, bottles, cabinets, and  more.

Neither ExxonMobil nor any other company promoted recycling as a magic solution or cure-all. It’s more expensive than virgin plastic, especially when transportation and sorting costs are factored in. Smaller items can clog sorting screens. Colored plastics have fewer recycling options than clear or white ones.

Most important, many types of plastics have little post-use demand or simply cannot be recycled. Others are integrated with electrical circuitry (motherboards and keyboards) or with paper or metal (laminates for food containers), making it impossible to separate and recycle them.

Thermoplastics can be heated, melted and reshaped or re-extruded into new products. These are the familiar #1 (PET) soda and water bottles, #2 (HDPE) milk and detergent containers, many #4 (LDPE) grocery bags and squeezable bottles, and some #5 (PP) yogurt and butter containers.

Thermoset plastics contain polymers that form irreversible chemical bonds that make strong products that cannot be remelted: vulcanized rubber for tires, Bakelite kitchenware, jewelry and circuit boards, epoxy resins, Duroplast car bodies and toilet seats, polyurethane cushions, insulation and windshields, et cetera.

Styrofoam cups and egg cartons cannot be recycled without (rare) specialized equipment and processes.

Moreover, even thermoplastics can be recycled only 2-3 times, before their polymer chains get shortened to the point where quality and durability become so low that the products are unusable.

(Newspaper, magazines, copying paper and Kraft paper bags have the same degradation problem: 6-7 trips to the recycler, and the cellulose fibers are too shortened, damaged and degraded to be reused. Steel, aluminum and glass, by contrast, can generally be recycled endless times.)

All these complexities explain why only a small fraction of plastics are recycled. ExxonMobil recycling 60,000,00-80,000,000 pounds of plastics per year may seem minuscule, compared to 73,000,000 tons of annual US plastic waste. However, it’s equivalent to 430-570 offshore wind turbine blades (350 feet long; 140,000 pounds apiece) that only end up in Grand-Canyonesque landfills.

Plus, plastic wastes can also be converted into diesel, aviation and gasoline fuels, and even electricity.

An excellent solution is to turn plastics and most other garbage into electricity for our increasingly power-hungry society – especially as AI and data centers proliferate, and politicians mandate that we convert our gas stoves, ovens, furnaces and water heaters to electric models.

A municipal waste-to-energy (WTE) / resource recovery facility operated by Reworld/Covanta performs these wondrous conversions just a few miles from my home. Enormous quantities of normally landfilled, nonrecyclable home, business, industrial, government and agricultural waste are dumped into a receiving area, sorted for unacceptable materials (eg, rocks), mixed thoroughly and emptied into the combustion chamber, where everything is burned with natural gas at 2000 degrees F, until it’s totally combusted.

Process heat is converted to steam, to drive turbines that generate 80 megawatts of electricity, enough for about 52,000 homes. Since 1990, the plant’s electricity has replaced the equivalent of some 2,000,000 barrels of crude oil each year. Dust and odor are contained within the facility; water from the wastes is recovered, treated and used as coolant; and air and water pollutants are kept well below EPA standards.

Even plastic-and-metal e-wastes (computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, and AI and data center machines) and “clean, green” energy equipment like solar panels can be “recycled” this way.

Enough iron, steel, aluminum, copper and other metals are recovered from the resultant ash to build 20,000 automobiles annually. The process also melts and recovers glass – and even recovers metals from e-wastes, light bulb bases, paper clips, staples, and metal bottoms from cardboard juice containers.

By the time the entire process is over, only nontoxic ash is left – about 5% of the original bulk mass of trash – and it gets used in cement and other applications or sent to landfills.

It reminds me of the old stockyard claim: The only part of the pig that isn’t used is the squeal.

So I have a few questions for Mr. Bonta.

* If you banish oil and gas, where will plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals and other products come from?

* Which plastics and vital plastic products do you intend to eradicate? What will doctors, pharmacists, optometrists, computer and cell phone users, and other consumers do without them?

* Recognizing that California has closed most of its nuclear, coal and gas power plants; that its net-zero, all-electricity mandates will soon double the state’s electricity needs; and that the state already imports one third of its electricity from neighboring states – why aren’t you suing to fast-track WTE plants?

* Why aren’t you suing Governor Newsom, President Biden, VP Harris, your state legislature and yourself for fraud and misrepresentation about green energy that isn’t clean, green, renewable or sustainable?

It’s time to recognize that “progressive” policies, mandates and lawsuits impose enormous costs on taxpayers, consumers and our environment – while politicians feed citizens a steady diet of lies.

The World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm Wrecked by a Storm Just Before Launch

Greens keep telling us we can expect more frequent and extreme superstorms – so what is the point of building vulnerable floating structures?

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?

Madhya Pradesh: Summer Storm Damages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant at Omkareshwar Dam (Watch Video)

Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between  Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.

The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured.

…Read more:

 https://www.lokmattimes.com/national/madhya-pradesh-summer-storm-damages-worlds-largest-floating-solar-plant-at-omkareshwar-dam-watch-video-a514/

A video of the disaster;

Anyone who has ever owned a boat, particular a large boat which gets left in the water, knows what a harsh environment the sea can be. Some kind of failure was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a storm, there are plenty of other things which could have gone wrong.

Greens keep telling us we can expect more frequent and extreme superstorms – so what is the point of building vulnerable floating structures?

Plastics tend to disintegrate under tropical sunlight, especially when in contact with water or water spray. Ultraviolet from the sun drives exotic chemical reactions, which leads to chemical breakdown.

Metal sitting in water is difficult to manage, even stainless steel is not immune to corrosion. All metal structures in contact with water need to be protected with sacrificial anodes or comparable protective measures. Electricity and metal are an especially bad combination, any electrical fault which causes a current to run through metal in contact with water can cause corrosion to occur thousands of times faster than normal.

Let us hope developers and politicians take the hint, and stop throwing our money at inherently flawed ideas like floating solar arrays.