Without oil, how will windmills and recycling bins be made?

Plastic can be made from any organic material and 'recycling' at some point will be just another mining operation. The point of the exercise is to reduce the use of oil and coal, not to totally end their use. The problem we have is that oil, coal and natural gas are in the hands of private interests whose 'interest' is selling these items at a profit. This means the more they sell, the more money they make. While this is a good thing for them, it isn't in the overall interest of the United States or the world in general. What to do? Several countries have 'solved' this problem by nationalizing these industries. The problem here is that these countries tend to be 'thugocracies'. That means that the profits flow into the hands of the ruling junta members...not a lot different from coal, oil and gas being owned by corporations as far as conservation is concerned. What we could do is gradually increase taxes on these items and these new taxes could be used to build up a wind and solar energy system over several decades time. Jimmy Carter suggested this back in the seventies, that and increasing the mpg per vehicle. For that reason he was attacked by the both the oil and coal industries and for the next 40 years little has been done to move this country toward 21st century technology. The same people today are also retarding moving toward 21st century technology, hoping to retain their 19th century technology until the last barrel of oil and the last ton of coal is burned. Oddly, at this point in time the world is awash with oil and we have billions of tons of coal....that doesn't mean that we should be burning it. Burning anything contributes to the load of CO2 in our paper thin atmosphere and thus contributes to climate change...another separate but related problem. For my money I would pull the corporate charters of ALL of the oil, coal and natural gas corporations and then reissue them if these corporations would agree to a slow movement away from their industries and adopt wind and solar as their eventual business. Lower profits? Maybe, but what's good for the long term health of 'our' country is more important than the accumulation of more wealth for any particular business entity. Short of that, nationalization under a government plan that wouldn't allow for any ripping off might be the best way to deal with this problem. Chances are that won't happen, so while other countries will enjoy non polluting energy production and high speed rail and high mileage personal transportation the US will stick with it's mid 20th century technology and so fall behind into 3rd world status. Bummer for us!

It may be possible to find materials that can replace the petroleum base. Since you can make a plastic out of renewables like corn and what have you, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. As for recycle bins, you can make those out of anything.

Quite frankly, how we make wind turbines is the last thing I would worry about as we move into the era of expensive oil. We'll have to downscale and cut our energy consumption inevitably. Substitution on a 1 to 1 basis is not possible.

Exactly, best get making them, the windTurbines at least, while we still have some of the black stuff. Recycling bins won't play a major part in a post oil economy.

I thought the old fashioned windmills were made of wood. They did have saws before then. At least it will give people jobs to cut the timber.

When all the oil is gone, the recycling wagon wont be able to get around to empty them. Recycling bins will be redundant. So we can recycle them. Simples!

"My conservative critics argue that aluminum of which the blades are synthetic on my own will require 5 years properly worth of electric output of windmill to extract from ore." a million. sounds like a load of crap to me. 2. they could be created from recycled aluminum this is already extracted from ore.

From different feedstocks. At the moment the cheapest plastics come from petrochemicals, but we can make them from other things, which we will have to in the future.

Make the plastics from Bio Oils. e.g. Rape Seed Oil.