Caitlin Cassidy is a journalist in Sydney, Australia, home to two of the world’s most iconic buildings. The first is the Queen Victoria Building — known to city residents as the QVB. Opened in 1898, it contains five stories of shops and restaurants and occupies an entire city block. The other is the equally impressive Sydney Opera House that has become not only the defining structure in the city but also a source of pride for all Australians. Recently, Cassidy embarked on a quest to spend an entire day without using any products derived from fossil fuel. She failed — miserably. Professor Yuan Chen, the head of the advanced carbon research lab at the University of Sydney, was not surprised. He told Cassidy her project was “impossible” and “not scientifically correct.” Yet she persisted. Her description of her travails during her day without fossil fuel makes for interesting reading, with several chuckles along the way for the reader and an occasional guffaw. There were two main challenges she had to overcome in order to be successful in her quest to avoid fossil fuel products. First, virtually every product you can think of is transported at some point by ship, train, airplane, or truck and the vast majority of those are powered by diesel fuel or its equivalent. Second, fossil fuels — whether oil or methane — are hydrocarbons. Chemists for the past 100 years have spent their entire careers learning how to rearrange chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms into interesting new materials such as nylon, dacron, polyethylene, teflon, and tens of thousands of other things that humans never knew they needed until they were invented and then found they couldn’t live without them. Even using cotton towels is a dilemma. Chen told Cassidy, “In order to efficiently grow cotton, you need a lot of fertilizer. Without fertilizer, without pesticide, they won’t grow so well. So in order to have such a large bio-based raw material, we also need assistance from petrochemical products.” A trip to an organic grocery store offered Cassidy a reality check. “Many of the fruits and vegetables are sealed behind layers of plastic. The issue is that single use plastic is so cheap. That’s why people started to overuse or abuse it, so we no longer reuse and recycle. “Bio-based material can be two or three times more expensive. And then if you look very carefully, they are also using petrochemical products in their making. In order for material to stand the moisture, the oxygen environment, so you can preserve the food for long enough, they have to mix with some of the petrochemical product.” Chen said our dependence on petrochemicals isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “In the next five or 10 years’ time, there will be a dramatic shift of how the world is using petrochemical products,” he says. “We can see the shift, which is a shift to more electrical-powered solutions, EVs, trains, and maybe in the future airplanes. Because electricity, you cannot just generate from the petrochemical, you can also generate it from solar, from wind, from many, many renewable sources.” Cassidy says she wrote her report on a day spent avoiding fossil fuel with a pencil on ordinary paper. Then she gave it to a colleague to transcribe into digital format. Fossil Fuel Supply & Demand That focus on affordability is just the hook we need to transition to a discussion between economist Paul Krugman and Greg Sargent, the host of The Daily Blast from The New Republic. As an economist, Krugman is intimately acquainted with how changes in supply and demand affect price. With regard to the current fossil fuel situation in the Strait of Hormuz, he said: “Although the price of oil is way up, consumption of oil is only down a little bit. And mostly what’s happening is that they’re drawing down inventories of oil, that people who have oil in storage tanks, with oil that was already on tankers, is being used up, which is all happening out of the belief that the strait will reopen soon and prices will come down. As people start to realize that that’s not about to happen — which has been happening just over the past couple of days — then the prices have to go much, much higher [emphasis added]. “Basically, the price of oil has to go high enough to inflict enough economic damage — we have to somehow or other stop, reduce the consumption of oil by another 11 million barrels a day. Convenient thing is that right now, world oil consumption is about 100 million a day. So that’s also about 11 percent. And it takes a huge price increase to do that. “It’s not easy to wean yourself off oil in a matter of weeks, which is what we’re kind of expecting has to happen. So this can get much — it’s ugly already. It’s ugly politically, obviously, for Trump and the Republicans to have gas hitting its highest level in four years. But it’s going to get a lot uglier very soon unless Trump swallows his pride and accepts that he actually lost this war.” Seeing The Inevitable Krugman knows how economies work and he can see what is coming our way with a clarity that few can match. “There’s a certain amount of oil available, which is less than it was. You can’t burn a barrel of oil that isn’t there. So one way or another, people have to be induced to burn less oil…..In effect nobody decides on it, but what happens is just that the price of oil, there’s bidding for barrels of oil, and the bidding drives the price up until the demand for oil has fallen back in line with the supply. “And the thing is, oil is — inelastic. It’s very hard for people to switch away from oil. Give me five years and we can all be driving electric cars, but next month we can’t. So the prices have to go really, really high to make that big of a dent in oil demand.” The Onrushing Calamity Do we really need a Nobel Prize winning economist to tell us what comes next? Probably not; it’s as plain as the nose on your face. Krugman says, “The trouble is that the world has not adapted to 15 percent less oil yet. If the strait stays closed, it will have to. If your forecast about world oil prices does not lead to a severe economic blow to the world economy, your forecast is too low, because there’s no scenario in which we get by with 15 percent less oil that doesn’t involve a global recession. “So if the strait stays closed, one way or another we will have a global recession. I don’t know what oil price that will mean — $150 a barrel, $200 a barrel. I can do some economic algebra there and try to give you an estimate, but it’s really all over the place. High enough that we have a global recession, because that’s the only way to reduce oil consumption that much that fast.” Bloomberg agrees that $200 a barrel oil is a realistic possibility. What he is saying is the same as what Caitlin Cassidy wrote — getting along without products derived from fossil fuels is exceedingly difficult. We can take some comfort knowing that a decrease in the supply of methane and oil will hasten the transition to renewables in the energy sector, but renewables don’t make fertilizer. Between the climate extremes that every farmer is facing and the antics of a doddering old fool who is still trying to win the approval of his long-dead father, a global shortage of food will inevitably be part of any significant reduction in global oil and methane supplies. Buckle up, people; there’s a bumpy ride ahead. The fact that this could have all been avoided if America was not ruled by a cabal of sycophants and lunatics will be cold comfort when the shelves in stores are bare and cars stay parked because the cost of gasoline is so high. Once again, an old adage applies to the people who voted to bring this human offal to power: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it!