61–70 of 174 posts
DO THEY NOT REALIZE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE USE FOSSIL FUELS?
We burn (no pun intended) through resources as fast as we want until there are none left. And then what?
I wonder why so many people are only looking at the economic side of this DO THEY NOT REALIZE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE USE FOSSIL FUELS? We burn (no pun intended) through resources as fast as we want until there are none left. And then what?
And then the price of the scarce resource will go up, pushing us towards alternative energy sources. And as time passes, we should have more efficient ways of harnessing those.
I wonder why so many people are only looking at the economic side of this DO THEY NOT REALIZE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE USE FOSSIL FUELS? We burn (no pun intended) through resources as fast as we want until there are none left. And then what?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether this is bad from the environmental standpoint depends on why the price is low. The price may be low because demand is off.
In fact it's low because supply is increased. Saudi was annoyed by North American innovation, and sought to dissuade private investors from financing any more of it. Private investors do wish that the price were higher, but it turns out that exploration and production costs are now low enough for North American production to be profitable still. For the most part, despotic regimes who control various national oilfiel…
The problem is that capitalism rapes externalities.
Even if you are not against the killing of an individual animal for food, for instance, the capability of doing so drives an increase in demand which drives an increase in supply -- billions of animals raised for the sole purpose of being killed for food. And then we try to do it more efficiently, at less cost, in factory farms. And economics drives us to this.
Similarly, the supply of oil will drive down prices and now result in newfound uses for it, we WILL use it up until none is left. And it's all in the atmosphere.
Same with elephant tusks in Africa being poached.
Same with overfishing.
Capitalism may be just too efficient... the name of the game is to increase money velocity through the system ... so without inflation, we will actually go even faster and eventually turn all the resources into garbage.
Oh and the greatest demand expansion of all... human population growth. The more people the faster we pollute. It's unsustainable. But all we can talk about are the cents each person is saving at the gas pump... really people?
And yet gas is still over $3 a gallon. Funny that...
I wonder why so many people are only looking at the economic side of this DO THEY NOT REALIZE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE USE FOSSIL FUELS? We burn (no pun intended) through resources as fast as we want until there are none left. And then what?
> And then what? And then the price of the scarce resource will go up, pushing us towards alternative energy sources. And as time passes, we should have more efficient ways of harnessing those.
The invisible hand of the market hasn't been very great at solving externality problems. Neither has government, as an institution. What we should be doing is investing more in initiatives like the Virgin Earth Challenge to stave off collapse. But when it comes to overfishing, and other things ... I'm not sure we can do that.
The best we can advocate is using condoms...
One one hand, I'm a bit worried as I know various folks that are dependent on the oil industry and this will probably mean more layoffs/companies closing, on the other hand, I'm really happy to see this (helps many economies as well as ordinary folks) and it seems some of the changes from oil to other sources of energy are finally showing some results (I hope)
OPEC is trying to destroy the American shale businesses by making them unprofitable. There was huge investment in shale based on higher oil prices and if they can't recoup that investment OPEC stands to keep their monopoly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are also some refinery problems in Indiana which is keeping gasoline at a premium when compared to oil.
That primarily impacts Canadian heavy crude exports. The BP Whiting refinery was the primary consumer of Canadian crude. Few other refineries (other than some on the Gulf coast) are configured to handle the product. That's why Canadian crude prices are collapsing...and why the price of gasoline in the upper midwest is going up. The only other option for Canadian crude to pipeline export to the Texas gulf coast. The p…
I wonder why so many people are only looking at the economic side of this DO THEY NOT REALIZE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND HOW WE USE FOSSIL FUELS? We burn (no pun intended) through resources as fast as we want until there are none left. And then what?
Problem is that we aren't really burning that much oil for our own personal transportation. We're burning oil on places where efficiency isn't a goal. Feeding a mammal to harvest meat or milk isn't efficient. We humans like meat, we support the industry and it keeps producing and transporting.
Maybe giving up on a car once a week, or something similar is easy, but most of your burning comes through heating, AC, meat and dairy, and then transport. Transport is efficient, it's product of engineers.
Mammals are product of evolution, they are not efficient in their production of meat and dairy.
One will burn less much more if one changes the diet, not means of transportation.
This is slightly worrying, because if we want to reduce CO2 emissions, we need to leave the oil in the ground. High prices may not be ideal economically, but they do reduce demand for oil, and increase demand for alternative energy.
Well, counter-intuitivley, consumer gas prices aren't falling nearly as much if at all. Personally I think the DOJ should investigate refineries, as none of the seem particularly eager to compete on price. They're making record profits as the price of crude collapses while the price of gasoline is flat. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-refinery-profits-recor... It seems very fishy to me that we have so much crud…
People had forty years to figure out, "Shit, what happens if gas gets expensive", and they did the wrong thing. Let'em pay.