If we replace all our “fossil” fuels with wind or sun or hydrogen, whence comes all or plastics from most of our clothing and in just about everything we use, large and small?
Before we had plastic we had wools from various animals, sheep, goats, alpacas, llamas, yaks etc. and cotton, silk, linen, and other plants........
The first plastic wasn’t from petroleum at all, but wood......... bakelite...,.......
“If we replace all our “fossil” fuels with wind or sun or hydrogen, whence comes all or plastics from most of our clothing and in just about everything we use, large and small?”
You just made the argument a lot of geologists make. Oil is too precious to burn to the sky we need every drop of it for all the other uses other than fuels. Humans have burnt 300+ million years of fossil sunshine accumulations in just under two centuries we have used more than half the recoverable oil at any price. 8 billion people living at EU level energy consumption levels which is half of what the USA is would burn out that last half in a decade or so. This planet is resource limited at 8+ billion souls we would need four earth’s to all live at a USA standard that’s easily verifiable by mathematics. Math is universal it has no politics.
Once it’s gone it’s gone and we have to go the synthetic route using syngas to build CH2nH or CH2+CH2 directly from CO,CO2+H2 gasses where you source those gasses is a wide choice, ocean water, the air itself, terrestrial biomass,coals,peat,micro+macro algae, Sea grasses, halophilic plants grown on seawater, or out right Ocean farming. Either way you need one CO to every three H2 to get alkenes, which are the basis for all the larger CH2 based polymers. To get to cyclic alkanes takes even more H2 to fully saturate the C=C bonds into C-C bonds instead.
In other words it’s very complicated to get from base molecules to.useful polymers let alone medications, and lubricants the polyalpha olfeins being the target plus group V esters. Fertilizers are easier you need a nitrogen source to make Urea or ammonia with that hydrogen. Plastics are the easiest polyethylene is the basic CH2+CH2+CH2.....into the millions for solid high density HDPE. Once you want neoprene,isobutal or styrene you are back to your cyclic alkenes or branch chained not all that easy to synthesis from base molecules without large side reaction loses. You are seeing the point right.Humans need to use our blessings of liquid hydrocarbons to move post haste to long term resource management before we face a case where there is 9+ billion all demanding access to smaller and smaller reserves of resources and the supply that could have been used to bootstrap into a long term resource management strategy that’s sustainable for the species all 8 billion of us.