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Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

bloomberg.com

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Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#121

Post by venomsnake »

beat wrote: post #83
emodendroket wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very rare that any country's government consists entirely of people acting in concert, so it seems strange to make a sweeping statement like that. Besides that, there are also real costs to environmental devastation.

Let's say government A implements a carbon tax that increases fossil fuel costs by 25%. Government B chooses not to do so. So energy, the driver of the economy, is 25% cheaper for government B, giving them a competitive advantage. Now government A will be under massive internal pressure to abolish the carbon tax, because they're losing market share to the cheap energy of government B. That's why it won't work. Extern…

Government A also taxes the carbon emission on goods produced in B on the border ... example Europe VAT.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#122

Post by [deleted] »

josefresco wrote: post #12

Does a documentary or any in-depth information exist for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology? I found the details of this university fascinating. FTA: Heavily armed guards on land and at sea protect the facility, where unveiled women study and work side by side with men, undisturbed by the religious police who patrol Saudi cities. Research there is aimed at scientific and commercial breakthroughs u…

[deleted]

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#123

Post by 67726e »

dirtyaura wrote: post #118
67726e wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that line of thought is that it's not going to be cheaper overnight. All the while Government A is plugging along on renewables, driving the price down, Government B is going to be eating Government A's lunch.

If the problem (CO2 pollution) is considered serious enough by multiple governments, Government A can join forces with Government C, D, and E and form a trade agreement against B. They can create a trade embargo against B, or have higher customs tax for products from Government B or other kinds of trade sanctions. Isn't this just international politics 101? EU and US have trade sanctions against Russia at the moment.…

Let's use a real-world example: China. How likely is that to work out? Now well. China gets cheaper oil, can't be easily coerced by force, and there is a large level of dependence.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#124

Post by emodendroket »

beat wrote: post #120
alexqgb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an absurdly oversimplified scenario that in no way accounts for the broad set of options available to governments faced with other governments operating like this. Let's just say your "Screw it, why bother?" approach is pretty far down the list.

Reality vs theory - "Screw it, why bother?" is the real-world top result. Do you see a concerted international effort to regulate away our dependence on fossil fuels? Because right now, the only concerted international effort I see is OPEC dumping oil on the market to underprice new competitors out of existence. The "options" of which you speak are mostly what wealthy industrial nations impose on poor and underdevelo…

Considering my initial point was that it's only a lack of political will that prevents action, I'm not sure what novel point you're making here.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#125

Post by beat »

emodendroket wrote: post #124
beat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality vs theory - "Screw it, why bother?" is the real-world top result. Do you see a concerted international effort to regulate away our dependence on fossil fuels? Because right now, the only concerted international effort I see is OPEC dumping oil on the market to underprice new competitors out of existence. The "options" of which you speak are mostly what wealthy industrial nations impose on poor and underdevelo…

Considering my initial point was that it's only a lack of political will that prevents action, I'm not sure what novel point you're making here.

"Lack of political will" ignores the complexity of the situation, when actors are motivated to cheat or exclude themselves from consensus. It's not a far cry from saying we lack the political will to end all wars.

I'm an engineer. Rather than complaining about what I wish I could do if I only had the resources, I think about what I can do with the resources that I have. In the case of something like fossil fuel, I think about how to create a less expensive alternative. Truly cheap wind/solar would put oil out of business by default.

This is also why I idolize Elon Musk. Rather than complaining about the lack of political will on the part of governments to get humanity off Earth permanently and stop using fossil fuel altogether, he created SpaceX and Tesla, and is making it profitable to solve humanity's deepest problems.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#126

Post by emodendroket »

beat wrote: post #125
emodendroket wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering my initial point was that it's only a lack of political will that prevents action, I'm not sure what novel point you're making here.

"Lack of political will" ignores the complexity of the situation, when actors are motivated to cheat or exclude themselves from consensus. It's not a far cry from saying we lack the political will to end all wars. I'm an engineer. Rather than complaining about what I wish I could do if I only had the resources, I think about what I can do with the resources that I have. In the case of something like fossil fuel, I th…

If the best solution we can come up with is electric cars then we're doomed.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#127

Post by nailer »

beat wrote: post #88
nailer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Saudi Arabia be against ISIS, except as a rival? Wahhabism originates in Saudi Arabia. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/iraq-crisis-how-...

ISIS is fundamentally different from Al Qaeda and the sort of Wahhibist terrorism that the Saudis have historically been involved in. It is a direct threat to the Saudi government, and every other Arab government. I'll point out that the Saudis have actively bombed ISIS. They're militarily involved in this war. It's a huge, huge deal for them.

> ISIS is fundamentally different from Al Qaeda

ISIS's old name was 'Al Qaeda in Iraq'.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#128

Post by crpatino »

fredkbloggs wrote: post #66

"Demand destruction" is nonsense. There will always be demand for hydrocarbons. Oil and its distillates remain the only viable means of fueling most motor vehicles, Tesla's hype machine notwithstanding. Even if you could somehow find the trillions of dollars needed to electrify every railway in the world and the tens of trillions more to build enough lithium batteries to replace every auto on the world's roads with a…

Demand destruction does not mean what you think it means. It does not mean that people will magically stop wanting cars because petrol is expensive. Rather, it means that because petrol is expensive, 95% of the market will suck it up and pay whatever prices is at the pump, but the poorer and most vulnerable 5% will face a financial crisis (on the personal dimension) because they simply cannot do so. So, they end up loosing their cars, their jobs and a bunch of other side effects. It's all simple microeconomics, allocation of a scarce good goes to the higher bidders.

In the short term this mechanism makes prices to self correct. If they rise so much that people cannot afford petrol and there's petrol to be sold, the price will have to go down and find another point of equilibrium.

The problem is that markets are rarely linear processes, and there are inherent delays between causes and effects. So signals take a non negligible time to move through the markets, and in practice this causes instability. And if the delays takes long enough, a business or industry can and do erode its own customer base.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#129

Post by dragonwriter »

nailer wrote: post #127
beat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISIS is fundamentally different from Al Qaeda and the sort of Wahhibist terrorism that the Saudis have historically been involved in. It is a direct threat to the Saudi government, and every other Arab government. I'll point out that the Saudis have actively bombed ISIS. They're militarily involved in this war. It's a huge, huge deal for them.

> ISIS is fundamentally different from Al Qaeda ISIS's old name was 'Al Qaeda in Iraq'.

> ISIS's old name was 'Al Qaeda in Iraq'.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) -- sometimes called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) -- has had only one previous name, the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). Arguably, even that's not really a previous name but just one of two groups that formed ISIL, though the other was itself an offshoot of ISI, so the point is debatable either way.

Among the organizations that came together to form ISI was the group formerly known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq", but even for that group, the name change in 2004 to "al-Qaeda in Iraq", was an opportunistic rebranding reflecting the currency of the "al-Qaeda" brand (and, arguably, also the simultaneous weakness of the actual substantive "al-Qaeda" organization, which made it interested in having in-name-only affiliates) in radical Islamic circles in 2004; it wasn't the original name of the group, which had been around for several years before affiliating itself with the al-Qaeda brand.

So the statement that ISIL -- or ISIS, if you prefer -- is "fundamentally different than al-Qaeda" is fairly accurate even if the main component of ISIL is a group that was for a few years affiliated loosely with al-Qaeda.

Re: Saudi Arabia’s Plan to Extend the Age of Oil

#130

Post by dragonwriter »

nailer wrote: post #65
btilly wrote: post #60

Here is my brother's pet theory on why the price of oil fell. Saudi Arabia wanted the USA to intervene against ISIS. The USA wanted the price of oil the fall to hamper Russia and Venezuela. Russia because they are getting aggressive and doing things in the Ukraine and Syria that we don't like. Venezuela because they are the center of anti-Americanism in South and Central America. Which is exactly what happened. We bo…

Why would Saudi Arabia be against ISIS, except as a rival? Wahhabism originates in Saudi Arabia. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/iraq-crisis-how-...

> Why would Saudi Arabia be against ISIS, except as a rival?

"As a rival" is the main reason any government is opposed to any other government or would-be government, so the question is silly from the outset.

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