Submitted by nastratin t3_11da9s2 in Futurology
What the fuck does the EPA even do anymore? Like what is their purpose other than placating the masses when they're greenlighting this shit?
it's all captured now.. irs can't tax the rich, epa can't enforce anything other then a doing business tax, same with all the bank regulations.
Yeah, when they were caught ignoring pleas from academia to do something about the lead in Michigan I pretty much wrote them off.
This didn't even seem to get much press, I think I saw a Frontline on it.
Same BS with the FDA. Our government is just about hopelessly corrupt and/or inept.
Time to move away and let the burden fall on the sickly politicians with foam in their mouths that stay
This is what tends to happen when you legalize government corruption. Welcome to the Plutocracy!
Dude trump put the vp of Exxon in charge of the epa.
u/ Ffffqqq details how Republicans are the party of anti-policing, laying bare how the GOP is aggressively defunding and/or eliminating the agencies who are responsible for policing the worst and most harmful actors in society.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/11bmnh8/uffffqqq_details_how_republicans_are_the_party_of/
1/4 people die of cancer tho…
The EPA has been gutted so badly that they aren’t able to do much of anything anymore. I know people who work there, and they’re all extremely passionate about environmental protection: they’re just short staffed and their ability to actually regulate is often limited.
That's... yeah. Jesus.
EPA that was gutted by trump
This entire initiative is Biden, begun under a Democrat controlled Congress:
"In January 2022, the EPA announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases."
You're both right! Trump positioned the head of exxon and biden kept the ball rolling =)
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we already went through this with leaded fuel
Well, I guess we shouldn't be surprised it's big oil companies pushing and advertising biofuels that aren't actually green or safe.
Here’s our new biofuel to replace oil — it’s made of discarded oil products. 🫠
Don't you guys love recycling? It's recycled plastic! /s
I typically just toss plastic since it usually ends up in a landfill anyway.
Canned or glass drinks only at my place lol
These aren't biofuels though. Many are just turning plastic to fuels.
The whole article and it doesn't bother to mention which chemicals they are talking about?
They don't know which chemicals they're talking about because neither Chevron nor the EPA will say which chemicals they are.
They don't know. It hasn't been disclosed yet:
>ProPublica and The Guardian did obtain one consent order that covers a dozen Chevron fuels made from plastics that were reviewed under the program. Although the EPA had blacked out sections, including the chemicals’ names, that document showed that the fuels that Chevron plans to make at its Pascagoula refinery present serious health risks,
Because they don’t expect most people to get past the headline
I didn't because I figure it's assuming everyone reading it is in the US. They're not
It will effect you soon enough.
No specific ones probably. The problem is taking contaminated recycled plastic and trying to make fuel that‘s actually safe to combust.
Shit ton of work went into refining gasoline, and plastics of various kinds will introduce elements that aren‘t present in oil in the first place.
Take PVC being in the recycled plastic, now you got hydrocarbons with chlorine as the end product.
Scary stuff.
It says recycled plastic, so it is probably just generic plastic combustion byproducts - the same thing you’d get if you burned plastic in your house. It’s really toxic stuff!
It's going to be used as jet fuel?! Well, fuck the maintenance crews further then. Like benzene wasn't enough to worry about.
I can't wait to see the air emergency that forces them to fuel dump over civilians. Or the crash with toxic plumes that makes first responders hesitant to approach.
Anything to actually do the right thing for the environment, as long as quarterly profits keep increasing.
Just stop burning shit. All of these things are half-measures. Stop trying to “fix” dirty combustion and instead go to solutions that don’t need dirty combustion. Solar, wind, nuclear, geo, hydro, battery power, and hydrogen are all going to be exponentially better than swapping the fuel.
In general, you're right, but jet fuel is one of the few things that we can't just "stop burning" right now. You simply can't replace jet fuel with batteries -- the energy density isn't there.
If some form of clean fuel were discovered, it would be amazing for air travel while we transition to electric planes, which will take a decade or more.
This is not that clean fuel, obviously, but we shouldn't discount fuels entirely.
Actually, we can quit burning jet fuel, but people don’t want the consequences of removing air travel.
fast air travel, anyway
Great point! 😁
You can have fast air travel without it... as long as you don't mind being rail-gunned at multiple times the speed of sound. You won't die as long as the track is long enough to limit gforce, but you may crap your pants
Man, if I knew my body could handle the stresses, I'd be willing to deal with shit to get back home (9 hour flight) significantly faster, let alone better for the environment.
Are you saying that facetiously? Because a world without air travel would be exhausting to get anywhere in. How does air travel get removed without posing an extreme burden to society and the economy?
Did you not read, or not understand my previous comment? Also, profanity isn’t wanted. Take it elsewhere or don’t reply.
80% of the world’s population has never even been on a plane.
Mostly what removing air travel would do is mean rich people have to take more time to go places.
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The best thing about hydrogen is that it requires very litle adjusment to convert natural gas combustion over to hydrogen. Already some succesfull converdion projects done for home heating. Omly hurdles are compact/save storage and clean generation.
Hydrogen is clean (assuming it's green and not blue), but it's remarkably inefficient. For home heating, you need almost 6 times as much renewable energy with a hydrogen furnace compared to an electric heat pump. And that's with a middle of the road heat pump (COP 3). The newer high end ones can reach a COP of 4 or 5, which is more than twice as efficient as a COP 3.
Hydrogen may very well be our best bet for air travel, but for things on the ground it's not a very good solution.
Only problem is that it's also stupidly dangerous, especially in a confined area with a lot of people like a plane
I mean... jet fuel is highly combustive. Jets explode when they crash. Any highly concentrated storage of energy (fuel tank, battery) is basically just another name for a bomb.
Except unlike batteries or gasoline, hydrogen is also colorless and odorless like carbon monoxide. So it's more like an invisible bomb that expands to the size of its container.
Straight electric is always gonna be better, it's more of an in-between solution and a way to make use of excess green power that might be overloading the net at certain times.
It isn't clean to burn regardless of what color. It gives off a lot of NOx.
As for air travel, the low energy density by volume makes it a pretty big barrier
And the worst thing is you have to store it under high pressure in big tanks and its extremely flammable. TANSTAAFL.
Uhm, no. First of hydrogen doesn't have the energy density by volume, you can convert it into methanol and use methanol fuel cells, but it still less energy dense than jet fuel.
And heating with hydrogen is a dumb idea, it outputs a ton of NOx.
What happens when you put politicians instead of engineers inside regulatory bodies. Just saying. I'm so tired of hearing about how we're killing ourselves, getting fucked over, loosing equity, and just slowing being ground down. Guys like trump really do unspeakable harm during their tenure, and they are focused on implementing it.
When Marx and Engels wrote "What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers", this is what they meant. Capital twists the fabric of society, governance, justice, and people, wringing out profits into fewer and fewer hands. Eventually it all has to snap.
The rise of climate change, ecological disaster, and nuclear brinkmanship changes the game, though. Class struggle is becoming a matter of not just how we order society, but humanity existing at all.
Capitalism might be late stage and on its way to the grave, but I think its a mass grave and the floor is made of dead bees and poor people.
Both wings are against you
And yet this was initiated and started by the Biden administration.
Almost like, anything that is handled by the inhuman money sucking parasites that caused the mess that is our irreversibly corrupt and cancerous system turns out to also be, corrupt and and actually cause cancer. 'BUT THEY SAID THE GOOD THING' ok yeah thats called marketing, and NPC like to believe it cos its easier.
Why the hell do they get to hide which chemicals their refining process puts into the air? The most their competitors could do with that information is reverse engineer the process and use it themselves. If Chevron is doing anything particularly special then they should patent the process. If they're not doing something they can patent, then it's not something their competitors won't also figure out because there are only so many ways that you can turn plastic into a flammable liquid.
It's like "natural flavors", on paper it is to hide their proprietary stuff, in reality it's so you don't know what you are really getting
As a former chemist... my complete lack of surprise. Bio fuel is incredibly Sulphur rich and dirty... also not energy effective. The less changes in energy states e.g. solar to battery the better.
This doesn't really fall into biofuels, it falls under waste fuels. Cause what they are burning is plastic which is still a fossil fuel.
You know we used to put lead into gasoline to make it more efficient. We stopped doing that because we found that it was a bad idea. Why can't we as a species just learn to not poison ourselves?
Ah so it's just like leaded fuel then (still used in propeller planes), they know it's toxic and they'll still make and use it
i think i'd rather have pollution than poison in the air
Ironically, plastic -> oil is worse for the climate than just leaving the plastic in the ground. Plastic, which famously doesn't degrade (though that's not exactly true; there are bacteria which are evolving to eat the stuff) is just another name for long term carbon storage. Obviously we'd much rather have that in a properly designed and build landfill than in the ocean. But turning it into oil and burning it is just putting more CO2 from oil into the atmosphere.
Not important, profit is where it’s at, right guys ?..
Anything but address the root problem of too much plastic waste.
Less plastic, less need to produce insanely potent carcinogens while recycling it.
A double whammy for the climate crisis, lower emissions and more cancer therefore fewer people!
/s
Like "Unreasonable risk" to human health has ever stopped the actions of the US Government/corporations.
There needs to be an amendment creating a 4th branch of government that only prosecutes corruption. It must publish all of it’s investigations publicly after completion, conviction or not.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/nastratin:
The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.
>That kind of risk is obscene,
said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
>You can’t let that get out.
That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11da9s2/this_climatefriendly_fuel_comes_with_an/ja7f6ap/
Sounds like a great way to fulfill the wall-e prophecy
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The greed is never ending - cut off an obese oil man’s lifeline - he’ll spend whatever it takes to keep the gravy train moving….
It's pretty obvious that government agencies are being pushed to make things "green". This is the result, it looks green at a glance so it's a win, right? Much like the ethanol in gas, it sounds great but it doesn't do anything to combat CO2 emissions and may actually make them worse.
More like being forced to make compromises. If you want A you have to agree with B. Because burning plastics isn't green, even the EPA admits it does nothing if you burn plastic. The problem was the rules were vague enough stating making fuel from "waste". Usually that means from waste food and etc. And waste would also include plastic, so they have to change the rules to deny them. But these loopholes aren't by accident, so good luck getting them changed.
Ethanol is cleaner than burning gasoline, it wasn't at first but it is these days assuming you aren't cutting down a new forest for it. That said, being better is marginal, especially when talking about making it from corn. It's like at best 1.5X improvement, but you can get 500X more energy out of that corn field if it was solar charging an electric car.
Remember how these weirdos pushed trans fat over saturated fat because it's better for the earth and doesn't rely on animals?.... Only to come out years later that eating trans fats are absolutely terrible for your health. These are the same nutcases that want us to eat grinded bugs and eat fake meats made out of soy.
Is this why micro plastics are in everyone's blood?
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Probably benzene plus impurities. Plastic is basically a bunch of C and H chains that burns well but reacts with whatever is in the mix.
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Is there a petition related to this anywhere? I feel like there should be a petition to let the govt know this is not what we mean by "work on the climate issue".
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Sorry but this article and the reaction to it seems to be sensationalized. the outrage here doesn’t match up with the actual chemistry taking place here.
Folks, Gasification of plastics is not a new technology. plastics contain organic molecules and can be decomposed via gasification into syngas which is then refined into sustainable fuels such as sustainable aviation fuel or renewable diesel. By definition, You don’t actually burn the plastic. You expose it to high heat without oxygen so that it doesn’t combust- this is what causes the molecular breakdown of the plastic into syngas. This is the syngas that is collected and refined via Fischer tropsch into new hydrocarbons.
There are no intermediate steps where micro plastics or other chemicals could come out of a smokestack, and a plant operator wouldn’t want that anyway. (It’s wasteful of feedstock, and the plastic is worth more as syngas than as trash)
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I mean if you think about it massacring a huge glob of the human population with cancerous fuel is kinda green for reducing the number of mouths industry need to support? /S
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So I guess we just have to wait for some kind of disaster and then blame it all on Trump for deregulation
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nastratin OP t1_ja7f6ap wrote
The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.
>That kind of risk is obscene,
said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
>You can’t let that get out.
That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.