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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

#141

Post by lightedman »

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?

"So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action? "

Get a gun, shoot the fuckers. It's that simple. How are all these bright minds on HN incapable of coming up with such a simple solution? The majority of countries supplying the world with oil are despots and should be wiped off the face of the planet.

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

#142

Post by lightedman »

cesarb wrote: post #134
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't burning ethanol still create CO2? I don't think we can maintain our current level of energy use from hydrocarbon based fuels (ethanol or otherwise) while still keeping CO2 emissions low.

With ethanol, the carbon which burns to create the CO2 came from atmospheric CO2 in the first place, during the growth of the sugar cane which was used to produce that ethanol. That is, the CO2 emissions from ethanol are not a problem because they are matched by an identical amount of CO2 capture.

"That is, the CO2 emissions from ethanol are not a problem because they are matched by an identical amount of CO2 capture."

You're missing every other machine using non-ethanol fuel to operate which is required for harvesting/producing ethanol biofuel.

Ethanol's net CO2 output is positive, not negative. That is not good.

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

#143

Post by dickeytk »

bilbo0s wrote: post #125
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…

What was eye opening to me is that, if the GP is to be believed, is that people keep buying F150s? Clearly, not everyone believes in the idea of climate change. (In fact, if that factoid is correct, a plurality of automobile consumers don't? That's a "wow" moment for me.)

Truck/suv sales are certainly up, but I think the F-150 has traditionally always been the top selling vehicle—more having to do with fewer options in the domestic full-size market and fleet sales though

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

#144

Post by kbutler »

corodra wrote: post #107
thaumasiotes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying it's effective. If you say the right thing but people still do the wrong thing... who cares? If you say the wrong thing, but people do the right thing, is that bad?

If you say the wrong thing, and people call you on it, and you demonize them and call up the mobs against them for it, then yes, it's bad.

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

#145

Post by mxschumacher »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #139
mxschumacher wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If enough divest from Exxon they become a penny share, Greenpeace could buy them purely to sit the reserves away from use. Ridiculous, but being bought as the share price drops low enough is not. Every time a currency drops markedly businesses there are exposed to another round of international buyouts. Similarly regulation and impact fines and levies will come. Maybe Exxon gets bought by someone looking to asset str…

"The Greenpeace buying Exxon for pennies" scenario is deeply unrealistic for the moment. It's like finding $295.000.000.000 on the street.

Exxon doesn't change if it's share price declines, the lower the price goes, the more attractive the opportunity from a risk-reward perspective.

With pension funds and hedge funds hungry for yields, somebody will always buy.

To go with your police scenario: In the oil industry, the police officer protects you while picking up the $100 bill and takes a 25% cut. That's the story of many oil-rich nations.

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

#146

Post by sgc »

mxschumacher wrote: post #135
thedstrat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I entirely disagree. By buying and owning shares of Exxon, you’re contributing and supporting the oil and gas industry. It’s completely a choice, as opposed to driving a car which is a financial necessity to some.

By not buying the shares, you make it more attractive for somebody else to buy them. For you to not buy the shares doesn't make any difference for Exxon. You should need one detractor who's interested in money. That's why the equilibrium is not stable. If you want to kill a business, stop buying from them. I'm not opposed to car ownership, but office workers don't need 450hp, 2.5t street tanks to cruise around in cit…

That is true to some extent, but if a stock tanks the company's value goes down, and lenders will not give them the same access to capital they had previously [1]. So they can't grow at the same rate, and in extreme cases will fail. For oil and gas, this effectively means locking some of it in the ground for the time being, while society (hopefully) works to reduce the demand via development and deployment of alternative technologies.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/investing/why-do-companies-care...

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

#147

Post by NeedMoreTea »

lightedman wrote: post #141
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?

"So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action? " Get a gun, shoot the fuckers. It's that simple. How are all these bright minds on HN incapable of coming up with such a simple solution? The majority of countries supplying the world with oil are despots and should be wiped off the face of the planet.

I'm thinking that might be challenging in the case of two of the world's top 4 oil exporters.

So that leaves the despots. Err how many countries have been invaded or been gifted a regime change because of oil? You think the perpetrators will ignore someone starting a shooting campaign against Saudi oil?

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

#148

Post by mxschumacher »

torpfactory wrote: post #140
mxschumacher wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By not buying the shares, you make it more attractive for somebody else to buy them. For you to not buy the shares doesn't make any difference for Exxon. You should need one detractor who's interested in money. That's why the equilibrium is not stable. If you want to kill a business, stop buying from them. I'm not opposed to car ownership, but office workers don't need 450hp, 2.5t street tanks to cruise around in cit…

Sure, but the price at which the shares are available decreases with fewer available buyers. Let’s not give oil companies the money or collateral to finance their expansion.

As I've elaborated in other responses to this thread:

the lower the price is, the more buyers there will be. The company does not change as its price moves. Every decrease in price means investors will get more for less.

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

#149

Post by hokkos »

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…

>Peak oil might have been a false flag scare

Oil is a limited resource, the value of its extraction is differentiable, it started at 0, and will finish at 0, following Rolle's theorem, it has a maximum, the peak oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolle%27s_theorem

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

#150

Post by fuzzfactor »

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.

>Oil doesn't extract and process itself, and there are many reserves of oil that will never make sense to pump.

True, but the most desirable wells to oilmen once drilled do actually produce oil at such a high rate naturally without further energy input that they need to have their flow rate restricted in order to become manageable. Processing, maintenance and further drilling can then be accomplished from revenue itself without further capital investment.

Relative to other things on Wall Street, it might as well extract and process itself.

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