Why buy coal mines if you could just by oil tankers and let them idle? This would drive up oil prices in many places, reduce demand demand for oil and make renewables and energy efficient technologies more competitive.
Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
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Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#12If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.
Yes this is similar to China attempting to corner the market on Lithium, but then as soon as they squeezed prices, Chile suddenly built out a massive amount of Lithium production.
You cannot "buy all the coal" any more than you can:
- buy all the oil (OPEC vs. NA shale fracking)
- buy all the lithium (China vs. Chile)
- buy all the magnesium (Freeport, TX vs. China vs. get from any seawater anywhere)
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#13If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.
That’s not how it works. If the price of coal goes up, other generation technologies outcompete it (renewables and natural gas). By disrupting the fossil fuel supply chain, you apply pressure to the point where coal generators are taken offline and demolished (lots of videos if you Google for coal plant demolition). This ensures you can’t go back, as the lead time is too long to build new coal and no one will finance…
That's an expensive bet if your model parameters are off by just a little bit.
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#14If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.
It sounds like you’re assuming the price elasticity of demand of coal is low.
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#15No post body was provided.
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#16The “Cash for Clunkers” program was actually instituted over a decade ago in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System
And having been "grad school broke" during that era, it absolutely destroyed a decade's worth of cheap "runs and drives" grade cars that I drove and most of my friends drove.
$100 cars were suddenly $1000 cars in a few months, which was fine if you owned one, bad if you were looking for another backyard project you could limp home and work on for a while.
"Destroying the long tail of cheap resources for political points" is the sort of "reverse thinking" that we need less of, especially by politicians who make the right noises about caring about the poor. Great, a bunch of older cars are off the road... sucks to be someone who used those for transport if you couldn't afford the payments on a new car (or didn't have reliable enough income to even consider that option).
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not how it works. If the price of coal goes up, other generation technologies outcompete it (renewables and natural gas). By disrupting the fossil fuel supply chain, you apply pressure to the point where coal generators are taken offline and demolished (lots of videos if you Google for coal plant demolition). This ensures you can’t go back, as the lead time is too long to build new coal and no one will finance…
That's an expensive bet if your model parameters are off by just a little bit.
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Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#18The “Cash for Clunkers” program was actually instituted over a decade ago in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System
And having been "grad school broke" during that era, it absolutely destroyed a decade's worth of cheap "runs and drives" grade cars that I drove and most of my friends drove. $100 cars were suddenly $1000 cars in a few months, which was fine if you owned one, bad if you were looking for another backyard project you could limp home and work on for a while. "Destroying the long tail of cheap resources for political poi…
Eggs, comrade, eggs. Specifically your eggs.
No, there won't be omelets. What are you, some sort of kulak?
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#19I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.
> Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. But you might consider applying a dose of Landsburg’s logic to your own “to do” list: don’t add a new item to the list unless you’re willing to do it immediately. I've got to ponder the to do list example though.
I think you'd end up with a similar amount of person-minutes of waiting overall, it just wouldn't be as apparent who is waiting for what.
As for the to do list, to me that suggestion amounts to nothing more than splitting my to do list into two, a "to do now" list, and a "to do eventually" list (well, I would call it a "two do" list), where I just move items from the second one to the first. That might have some value, but it's not a mind-blowing reversal of logic.
Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic
#20Why buy coal mines if you could just by oil tankers and let them idle? This would drive up oil prices in many places, reduce demand demand for oil and make renewables and energy efficient technologies more competitive.
For starters that plan probably wouldn't work. The cost of taking that much much oil out of the market and sitting it idly would bankrupt the parties involved.
For seconds if the plan did work, the group responsible would likely be designated as terrorists and get taken out by the US military.