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

nytimes.com

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

#91

Post by corodra »

nickik wrote: post #86
corodra wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think the "peak oil scare" was good. That's when we all started to focus and take renewables seriously. I find it funny that OPEC never learned from its mistake from the 70s when there was the oil shortage and fuel efficiency became a thing. To be aware, fuel efficiency before then was never worth mentioning in a car sale. Yes, it never became too big because the shortage ended, but it at least got star…

> To be fair, I think the "peak oil scare" was good. That's when we all started to focus and take renewables seriously. I No not really. It made me focus on looking into the 'peak oil' claims and I then realized that was major nonsense and people who proclaim it should not be taken seriously and are instantly discredited in anything they say. Peak oil was a major distraction about the actual issues that should have b…

"The house is burning! The house is burning!" A child laughs.

Parents take the child out of the house quickly in fear. After a moment a plane crashes into the house, obliterating it.

While yes, the child was full of shit. It still led to something marginally good. Maybe the parents should have left him in the house because he's a little shit. That might make the situation better. But that's an ethics question I don't feel like exploring.

Peak oil might have been a false flag scare, true. I'm not going to argue with you on that. Fuck it, I'm going to agree with you. It was a total bullshit scare! But it was a scare that led to a big push in getting away from fossil fuels. So still, it was a good thing. Ends justify the means.

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

#92

Post by nickik »

perfunctory wrote: post #70
corodra wrote: post #42

I have a hard time taking this article too seriously. >not coming from the usual producers, but from Brazil, Canada, Norway and Guyana — countries that are either not known for oil or whose production has been lackluster in recent years. Canada ranks 5 in oil exports, Norway 13, Brazil 21. Sure, Guyana belongs in that sentence. But... uh, okay? Rank 5 is "not usual"? Next part, wtf do you expect? Oil companies are go…

> A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action?

My solution would simply be to massively focus on nuclear. Replace all existing coal plants with nuclear plants and plug them into the network.

Once you have mass production of nuclear power plants, you can start using nuclear power to create liquid alcohol fuels. Start a process of changing cars to electric or alcohol based fuels, the same goes for ships and eventually planes.

The process of switching to alcohol based fuels can be started in parallel, with early on using fossil fuels.

Start taxing fossil fuel usage to make people move over to liquid fuels.

This vision was created out by one of the nuclear innovates. He invented the PWR (currently used nuclear) but rejected it as a terrible design for human energy production. His insistence that PWR were not 'perfectly save' got him essentially fired. He had come up with Molten Salt reactors to fix all the issues of PWRs.

His vision was more to use nuclear heat to turn salt water into water you can use for irrigation. Not really produce Liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way but the vision makes sense.

Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s, but it would have been the most systematic approach to actually solving the problem. But of course that requires the population not to freak out about nuclear and to accept potentially higher oil prices.

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

#93

Post by Merrill »

corodra wrote: post #72
crispyambulance wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the peak in "peak oil" is a very wide peak with a lot of noise in it. That makes it easy for certain people to make-believe it's not going to happen. But it is... we just might not be able to predict which decade with certainty. Perhaps this is a kind of an intelligence test for human civilization. Can we stop the global guzzling of petroleum resources before there's a profound ecological and economic shock?…

Look, I'm just about a complete package when it comes to being an asshole. My history on HN is more than enough to prove that. But, I don't' think humans are that useless to where they're going to fail in fixing this. This can be reversed and we're in the beginning stages. The hole in the ozone layer was deemed doomed and without repair. NASA has it in track on being fully recovered in around 2060 since we stopped us…

The ozone hole was mostly fixed by changing refrigerants. This was fought at first until it became apparent that substitute refrigerants could be produced. At that point, the refrigerant manufacturers and the manufacturers of air conditioning equipment saw that there was a pot of gold in the transition and dropped their opposition. The consumer paid for it, but consumers are often led astray and aren't organized enough to fight for their self interest.

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

#94

Post by SuoDuanDao »

eej71 wrote: post #69
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

extraction companies are taxed or owned outright, end products are subsidized.

Sounds like it will just net out.

Only if you tend to use as much as you produce. If you're a net exporter, it pays for a lot.

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

#95

Post by thaumasiotes »

corodra wrote: post #91
nickik wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair, I think the "peak oil scare" was good. That's when we all started to focus and take renewables seriously. I No not really. It made me focus on looking into the 'peak oil' claims and I then realized that was major nonsense and people who proclaim it should not be taken seriously and are instantly discredited in anything they say. Peak oil was a major distraction about the actual issues that should have b…

"The house is burning! The house is burning!" A child laughs. Parents take the child out of the house quickly in fear. After a moment a plane crashes into the house, obliterating it. While yes, the child was full of shit. It still led to something marginally good. Maybe the parents should have left him in the house because he's a little shit. That might make the situation better. But that's an ethics question I don't…

> It was a total bullshit scare! But it was a scare that led to a big push in getting away from fossil fuels. So still, it was a good thing. Ends justify the means.

When this kind of thinking is common, though, you lose the ability to engage at all with people who might not believe that "getting away from fossil fuels" is valuable as an end in itself.[1]

Is it valuable for other reasons? Certainly not any reasons that might come out of your mouth.

[1] Which, frankly, should be everyone. What kind of terminal goal is that?

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

#96

Post by cmrdporcupine »

corodra wrote: post #87
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Like... do inflamed Canadians hold the door open for you but not tell you to have a good day...ah? Jokes aside, Canada actually stands to profit well from global warming. With thousands of years of resting, fertile top soil, lands not suitable for agriculture due to short growing seasons... well, you'll have better growing seasons. Plus still be cool enough to not be a scorching wasteland. Just being realistic. Many…

Har har stereotypes.

Most of Canada's north is in fact granite "Canadian shield" country with thin or non-existent top soils. See map here: https://cdn.britannica.com/s:700x450/98/180898-050-810A6879/...

Also the bulk of the population lives next to the border, in areas as far south as northern California / southern Oregon.

In reality Canada will not likely benefit economically from global warming because for its entire history it's been mostly an exporter of resources, not a producer of finished goods. Right now a large part of GDP from exports is from oil and gas, and the dominant economic class here benefits from keeping it that way. Similar to Russia, actually.

Canada already has plenty of fertile soils (rapidly being destroyed by urban sprawl, but that's another story). And it used to be one of the world's biggest food exporters. It is now a net food importer. Because it's cheaper to produce food elsewhere with dirt cheap labour in Mexico and so on. That isn't likely to change.

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

#97

Post by rossdavidh »

So, interesting and all, but not even mentioning what is happening to coal the last few years seems like an odd omission. Coal is essentially disappearing from the world's energy mix. As big as coal was, it takes a while to go away completely, but the trend does not seem to be slowing down. By some estimates, there are a lot of cases now where it is more expensive to keep running an existing coal-fired power plant, than to replace it with solar or wind.

So, at least a substantial fraction of this oil is replacing coal, which doesn't mean it's all ok for the climate change issue, but it seems like an important point to be just leaving out of the story entirely.

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

#98

Post by joshypants »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #74

I mean, hopefully it's common knowledge now that it's impossible to combat climate change by working within markets.

It hasn't worked for the past 30 years. But any minute now it'll kick in, just hold your breath and wait.

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

#100

Post by mxschumacher »

Demand for oil&gas will continue to grow for a long time due to:

- SUV/pick-up boom (America's best-selling car in 2018 is the F150 series!) and more cars + trucks in countries like Brazil, India, China, Indonesia

- crazy growth in air travel (look at order numbers of Airbus, see how many airports are under construction, see miles traveled via plane)

- simultaneous shift away from coal+ nuclear, giving a huge boost to natural gas in the long term (LNG build-out is only now beginning)

- the world getting richer (more and more humans are living like Westerners). We're on a path towards $100tn/y world GDP and 10bn humans.

I provide more detail + resources on my blog: https://mxschumacher.xyz/post/long_oil_and_gas/

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