And more unemployed seamen’s.

I laughed.

Sure, but when a lot of the things don't need to carry the fuel with them and induction roadways do it all in the moment?

We don't, we decompose. Fossil fuels are basically plants that died and were subsumed millions of years before bacteria and fungi evolved to decompose them.That doesn't happen anymore.

... it's people!!

Theres a lot of misunderstanding going on here about both corn and solar power.

Corn is not something that requires ideal or fertile real estate. People imagine corn being grown in the stereotypical midwestern river-adjacent and particularly fertile type of places, like Iowa or Ohio or whatever. The reality is that modern corn production requires a shitload of artificial nitrogen fertilization, so the actual fertility of the land is virtually unimportant. Believe it or not, Texas is actually one of the most productive places for corn farming, and in particularly hot and arid areas where you wouldnt be farming much else. More like typical ranching land, not prime farming land.

Now with solar power, at the current levels of efficiency (and unlike corn), having a cloudy day is a major killer. UV intensity at high elevation can be virtually nothing when it gets a little cloudy. Whereas on a sunny say it would be extremely high. So you need ideally somewhere that is as high altitude as possible, but where it is also sunny almost all the time. There are not a lot of places that meet that description, and even the few places that do are largely very expensive to acquire land in because people want to build houses and hotels and golf courses and whatever else in (or adjacent to) the mountains. Take Pueblo, CO, for example. It’s one of the solar hubs of the US. But its difficult to expand from there because you can either go east, down in elevation, and increase the number of cloudy days. Or you can try to go west and everything becomes exponentially more expensive the closer you get to the Rockies.

More importantly though, corn and solar production necessitate two completely different environments. No one is growing corn in Pueblo, and you wont find many solar fields in places where corn is grown effectively. Because a lot of the time people grow corn where it rains often, therefore those places have many more cloudy days in a year. Realistically you cant just take corn fields and turn them into solar fields

I do watch Alec, but this came from my own - informal - work.

Its sort of happening hard like that but companies are resilient. According to the news, in the Philippines they are asking people to work from home and reduce energy use. It's a beautiful country but you can see evidence of industry everywhere you go. Candy wrappers and bags on the street, etc etc. In most neighborhoods you see people sweeping like they do in Mexico. But roads, rivers are covered in trash unless they are part of the tourism industry. It much worse in India from what I can tell. So if that is being reduced, hopefully it will just stop happening.

Yes, thats assumed. However we are taking into account that machinery rusts away quickly. If you stop one refinery for example, that's not a smooth change, its an abrupt step. If we stay steady below the usual high, then trying to come back will be expensive. For that reason we'll see the price increase slowly...you need the fuel, so its a seller's market, they need to get paid as if their load was double in case they need to double. At some point it might drop a bit until it becomes a luxury item.

Here's an example where the price is going up became the supply keeps dropping and the demand keeps increasing regardless of the supply situation:

The same would happen to ice cars. People still want to use them if they have them, but the market keeps shrinking.

I read recently that they found bacteria in the ocean that's actually metabolizing some (PET) plastics, so that's kind of interesting. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251104013023.htm