Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 489 posts

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#31

Post by bryanlarsen »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #16
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from an assumption that all the oil in the ground is going to be dug up and burned. It's too much money for some of these countries to ignore - the article mentions Guyana, a poor country that now has a way to print money. It also mentiones Venezuela, the country wi…

That's a nice way of saying "give up on fighting climate change".

We can burn as many barrels of oil as we want as long as we pay $100 - $300 per barrel to sequester the resulting CO2.

There are places where that makes sense economically, but there aren't very many of those.

Of course there are countries that will try to avoid doing that, but they can be coerced to join via carbon tariffs.

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#32

Post by pnako »

jdjdjjsjs wrote: post #5
nabla9 wrote: post #2

This is incredibly good news for the developing world in the short- and medium term, but really bad news for the long term. Cheap energy boosts economic growth and well-being. Oil finds its comparative advantage relative to cheap solar. Globally liquid fuel production and consumption just goes up year after year https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig6.png Reduced use of hydrocarbons in the west is nice but it's…

The idea that the developing world will benefit from cheap oil is ridiculous. The developing world is the one suffering from the impacts of global warming. Several countries in Africa are suffering from wars worsened by climate change driven migrations. Countries like India have a mix of cities running out of water, cities flooded by water and cities drowning in pollution which is almost certainly gonna erase years o…

>Several countries in Africa are suffering from wars worsened by climate change driven migrations.

Why would migration lead to war? (I'll be honest: this is a rhetorical question.)

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#33

Post by thehappypm »

tomp wrote: post #20
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from an assumption that all the oil in the ground is going to be dug up and burned. It's too much money for some of these countries to ignore - the article mentions Guyana, a poor country that now has a way to print money. It also mentiones Venezuela, the country wi…

That would be a catastrophe. Basically all oxygen in the atmosphere is a result of photosynthesis, which (combined with animals breathing) is a closed cycle ( edit: in terms of mass, not energy) unless some of the resulting biomass (glucose) is buried underground (as oil and/or coal). Digging up and burning all fossil fuels would consume all oxygen in the atmosphere... let's hope that at least some of it is buried so…

You are spreading fake news. There is far more oxygen in the atmosphere than can be burned by fossil fuels.

https://www.popsci.com/amy-geppert/article/2008-09/will-we-r...

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#34

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tomp wrote: post #20
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from an assumption that all the oil in the ground is going to be dug up and burned. It's too much money for some of these countries to ignore - the article mentions Guyana, a poor country that now has a way to print money. It also mentiones Venezuela, the country wi…

That would be a catastrophe. Basically all oxygen in the atmosphere is a result of photosynthesis, which (combined with animals breathing) is a closed cycle ( edit: in terms of mass, not energy) unless some of the resulting biomass (glucose) is buried underground (as oil and/or coal). Digging up and burning all fossil fuels would consume all oxygen in the atmosphere... let's hope that at least some of it is buried so…

> Digging up and burning all fossil fuels would consume all oxygen in the atmosphere

No, it wouldn’t.

Not all biomass turns into fossil fuels. And a lot of carbon is stored in living and recently-deceased biomass.

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#36

Post by eej71 »

neuronic wrote: post #14
perfunctory wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The growth will slow down and stop in decade or two. I heard exact same statement a decade or two ago.

Are you suggesting that growth is infinite?

Not quite - but what makes us so successful aren't the resources themselves but our (nearly) endless ability to be creative, to learn, to understand, to come up with new ways to make use of those finite resource. In a sense, the effective supply of oil has increased thanks to our increase in the supply of knowledge. I expect that to continue for many lifetimes to come.

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#37

Post by eej71 »

jdjdjjsjs wrote: post #6
option_greek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developing nations never pass cheaper oil benefit to the end consumers. They just increase taxes to offset the decrease in price (and thats a good thing). So there won't be any increase in consumption due to low prices.

This is also exactly correct. The actual reason is that fossil fuels are highly subsidized in most developing countries, so the only impact this has is in reducing the subsidies paid by the government exchequer.

Not sure I understand how they can be both highly subsidized and yet highly taxed at the same time.

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#38

Post by eej71 »

jdjdjjsjs wrote: post #5
nabla9 wrote: post #2

This is incredibly good news for the developing world in the short- and medium term, but really bad news for the long term. Cheap energy boosts economic growth and well-being. Oil finds its comparative advantage relative to cheap solar. Globally liquid fuel production and consumption just goes up year after year https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig6.png Reduced use of hydrocarbons in the west is nice but it's…

The idea that the developing world will benefit from cheap oil is ridiculous. The developing world is the one suffering from the impacts of global warming. Several countries in Africa are suffering from wars worsened by climate change driven migrations. Countries like India have a mix of cities running out of water, cities flooded by water and cities drowning in pollution which is almost certainly gonna erase years o…

Fossil fuels have already spent the last 150 years lifting out hundreds of millions of people in what were then developing countries. I hope it continues.

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#39

Post by [deleted] »

endorphone wrote: post #27
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from an assumption that all the oil in the ground is going to be dug up and burned. It's too much money for some of these countries to ignore - the article mentions Guyana, a poor country that now has a way to print money. It also mentiones Venezuela, the country wi…

Oil doesn't extract and process itself, and there are many reserves of oil that will never make sense to pump. Already in a lot of areas, such as the oil sands, it's tenuous because oil is barely at a price to support extraction, yet oil is expensive enough that it's being undercut by clean energy. Enormous reserves will never be extracted through simple, basic economics. We're already at a breaking point.

[deleted]

Re: Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming

#40

Post by anovikov »

endorphone wrote: post #27
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from an assumption that all the oil in the ground is going to be dug up and burned. It's too much money for some of these countries to ignore - the article mentions Guyana, a poor country that now has a way to print money. It also mentiones Venezuela, the country wi…

Oil doesn't extract and process itself, and there are many reserves of oil that will never make sense to pump. Already in a lot of areas, such as the oil sands, it's tenuous because oil is barely at a price to support extraction, yet oil is expensive enough that it's being undercut by clean energy. Enormous reserves will never be extracted through simple, basic economics. We're already at a breaking point.

But the whole story are the new extraction methods which make reserves inaccessible or uneconomical to extract before, accessible and economical.

Yeah people need to get real: any and all hydrocarbons will be dug out at some point. Unless you want to make a pact to nuke the countries that do it beyond a certain level (which can double as a nice way to mitigate global warming at least for a while). For some nations such as Saudi Arabia, digging and selling hydrocarbons is the core and essence of their existence and is what separating them from bedouins/forest people living in the wild in total savagery. There is absolutely no way they could do something else for a living.

Developed nations could stop doing it. Europe for example, almost did (it has even more shale oil and gas than U.S. does and made a conscious decision to ban it's extraction), U.S. could do too if it wanted, but many poor countries just can't.

Post reply on HN