Billions of Barrels of Oil Vanish in a Puff of Accounting Smoke

[Warpy]

14. Putting the Pentagon on a diet would help

since they're the biggest single fossil fuel user. It would also help a lot to start growing industrial hemp again. Not only would that decrease the need for wood pulp and help reforestation, the oil from hemp seed can replace a lot of petroleum products.

We'll still need petroleum type products, especially in agriculture.

Research into carbon fixing bacteria also needs to be better funded.

We've actually been transitioning to cleaner energy my whole lifetime: coal central heating to natural gas or oil; wasteful incandescent lights to LEDs and CFLs; a move away from heavy, inefficient, heavily polluting vehicles to lighter cars with catalytic converters and now a move to hybrids and EVs. Even major appliances have increased efficiency. Without being particularly inconvenienced, we've all been cutting down our carbon footprints without much realizing it. We've even gone from energy sucking CRTs to LED screens. Even the conversion away from land lines and cable TV saves energy by not needing the production of millions of miles of infrastructure.

I feel pretty optimistic that we will manage not to cook the planet completely. The transition is likely to get more difficult as more area faces desertification.

We just need to learn how to kick the conservatives in both parties out of our way.