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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

#111

Post by torpfactory »

"I hope that humanity will be able to free itself from its addiction of fossil fuels (arguably it is the primary reason for violent conflict in the last 30 years and the driving force behind climate change), but my bet is that things will get worse for a lot longer before we even reach the inflection point of “peak oil”.

Change must happen. Change will happen. I don’t think the oil and gas industry is anywhere near to disappearing. Given the current valuation of many integrated oil majors, the favorable growth and interest rate environment, I believe that it is a good time to invest in oil companies."

I love the cynicism of this perspective: We are well aware the world will burn because of this technology, but hey, you can make a buck now, so keep perpetuating the status quo. These kind of opinions are so frustrating.

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

#113

Post by swebs »

gadders wrote: post #89

Remember when everyone was talking about peak oil? https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2018/06/29/what-ev...

Yes, and as the article says, we've past that point in the mid 2000's, which is why companies have resorted to fracking.

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

#114

Post by jeffreyrogers »

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.

What countries are these? The conflict areas in Africa I'm familiar with (e.g. Great Lakes region), seem to be driven almost entirely over access to valuable resources.

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

#115

Post by perfunctory »

nickik wrote: post #92
perfunctory wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bas…

Let's suppose this is a good plan. But it's still just a plan. How do we actually realize it? We both know voting alone won't cut it.

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

#116

Post by Turing_Machine »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34
tomp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even more of the Earth's original carbon is stored in the miles-deep layers of carbonate rocks that cover much of the Earth's surface.

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

#117

Post by mxschumacher »

torpfactory wrote: post #111

"I hope that humanity will be able to free itself from its addiction of fossil fuels (arguably it is the primary reason for violent conflict in the last 30 years and the driving force behind climate change), but my bet is that things will get worse for a lot longer before we even reach the inflection point of “peak oil”. Change must happen. Change will happen. I don’t think the oil and gas industry is anywhere near t…

I see what you mean.

A more general question about capitalism can be considered here: Who holds responsibility, consumers or producers? Both?

In my view, consumers who choose to lower their demand of fossil fuels (by using the bike instead of the car and reducing their vacationing on different continents) actually make a difference. If people stop consuming, companies go out of business.

Investing on the other hand is a zero-sum game: If a promising opportunity exists, somebody will finance it. Anything else is unstable in a game-theory sense, it's like asking people to not pick up $100-bills from the street.

In simpler terms: If you own Exxon shares you are not making climate change worse, but if you eat meat and own a car, you do.

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

#118

Post by acidburnNSA »

adrianN wrote: post #77
acidburnNSA wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the generators have gotten cheaper, there's some indication that total energy costs have increased because of the cost of dealing with the intermittent nature of wind and solar. So for economics one must look well beyond levelized cost of electricity nowadays. If indeed energy storage costs dominate beyond 40% renewable penetration (total energy) then the exponential curve we see today at the 5% level will likely…

We are very far away from 40% renewables for primary energy consumption. Almost all countries are very far away even if you just look at electricity.

Exactly. We're closer to the 5% level today. I just see a lot of people seeing good renewable performance at a subsystems level and thinking it will continue unfettered up to the point that matters for climate change mitigation.

Meanwhile we're actually building massive amounts of fracked natural gas generators, we're shutting down low-carbon nuclear plants, oil use in Asia is going gangbusters, NIMBYism around wind and solar and transmission is ramping up, and carbon emissions are rising at 2%/year.

I feel like the "solar is now dirt cheap, and batteries!" thing is acting as a lullaby when we really need to continue to be alarmed about climate change and work hard to mitigate it. This problem isn't going to solve itself.

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

#119

Post by notfromhere »

LatteLazy wrote: post #35

Opec is a price fixing association of the most of the world's worst countries. From funding terror to obscene inequality to political and religious oppression. But if it weren't for them, we'd be in a much worse position on climate change...

Four out of the top five oil producing nations aren't even in OPEC. Shale kind of killed the ability of the Saudis to control global prices

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

#120

Post by prepend »

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…

I remember listening to a Michael Moore book in 00s where he talked about peak oil and had a funny story about a grandparent telling kids what it was like to have petroleum products like plastic and whatnot. He listed all the things made with oil that would disappear. I thought that was a bit crazy so did some research on the topic and realized that he was either full of horse apples, or stupid, or being deceitful, or some mix.

Since then, I’ve been curious about peak oil claims and they all seemed really wrong headed.

The best I can think is that they were trying to trick people into using renewables. But I think tricking people is short sighted because when the trick wears off, I don’t trust the person again.

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