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BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

reuters.com

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Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#61

Post by nomel »

foobarian wrote: post #58
nomel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unpopular question, where people assume things about me, but by what mechanism would the human species be ruined? It seems that would require that all innovation towards climate mitigations stops, when it hasn't really even started yet. Reversing climate change probably isn't going to happen, but mitigation is still on the table, from routing fresh water from wetter northern climates to desalinization plan…

Perhaps once all the easy obtainable fossil resources are gone, and climate change settles down on a new equilibrium, humanity will also settle on a long-term sustainable way of living. Perhaps that will even be a civilized way, but it may also well end up a hunter-gatherer existence akin to what Europeans found in North America a few centuries ago.

> but it may also well end up a hunter-gatherer existence akin to what Europeans found in North America a few centuries ago.

How could finding naturally growing plants eventually be more successful than technological innovations around agriculture, in a drier climate (our future)? This doesn't seem logical/rational, since every desert civilization moved away from a hunter-gather existence. Irrigation has existed for millennia, invented by people that lived in dry places [1], because it wasn't optional.

[1] https://eprints.nwisrl.ars.usda.gov/id/eprint/815/1/1070.pdf

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#62

Post by Krssst »

dml2135 wrote: post #59
shadowtree wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet you use to transmit this message wouldn't exist without fossil fuels - and I am not talking about energy, but computer and networking materials. Ditto the fertilizer and many other things that keep you alive to type on here too. It's very hard to maintain modern civilization without oil/gas products. Unless you want to be Amish.

I’d rather be Amish than dead!

And while I agree it's hard, I think that keeping an industrial society should be possible. (although it means reworking almost all the production apparel to be carbon neutral (concrete/steel/fertilizer production, transports, agriculture, ...). Not going to happen in the short-term without an extremely strong political push and more research, on the world scale)

Actual production may become lower than today, but I'd like to believe we don't have to go full Amish.

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#63

Post by kieranmaine »

Supermancho wrote: post #45
jimbob45 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it not seem like electric vehicles will eventually swallow the world? It feels like it's 1900 and you're fighting tooth-and-nail to combat horse maltreatment while the rest of the world is surging toward a car-laden future. Would it not make more sense to simply focus efforts on EV adoption?

> Does it not seem like electric vehicles will eventually swallow the world? I don't believe so. As I understand it, there are not enough rare metals available, with the known battery technologies. I don't think will ever be the production capacity to construct and maintain (replace) electric-based equivalents to the solutions fossil fuels fit. Fossil fuels came to dominance because of a number of maximal equations.…

From "Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones" - https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/09/19/...

Apologies for the paywalled article. The following quote sums up the article:

"Globally, the mining of raw ingredients for battery manufacturing could peak by the mid 2030s, reckons RMI, an American think-tank. This will be caused by a combination of better recycling and continuing advances in battery chemistry, which boosts the energy density of cells so that batteries can be made with fewer raw materials. This, RMI believes, might see mineral extraction for batteries being avoided altogether by 2050."

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#64

Post by delecti »

Spooky23 wrote: post #28
linkjuice4all wrote: post #8

It's depressing to see companies moving back towards a carbon-burning future. It seemed like electric vehicles, battery technology, and solar power advancement was finally starting to kill the market for ICE engines and 'dirty' thermal power. Between reversions like this, RTO mandates, and global conflicts that seem to include blowing up oil refineries it seems like there's absolutely no hope or interest from any maj…

Nothing changed. We’re literally in an auto market flooded with EVs. Solar is a ROI positive investment that is gobbling up farmland in a problematic way. If you’re a geek, you probably got hyped up by Elon when he was saving the world with electric cars. Now that he’s regressed to his effort to offer himself for impregnation services to repopulate and installing fascist dictatorships, the electric car stuff has gone…

Based on some back of the envelope math, if the US met 100% of its electricity needs with solar, it'd take about 1.6% as much area as the US currently has farmland (22k sqmi vs 1.4mm sqmi). Considering some solar is on non-arable land, and how much excess corn the US grows (enough that some is turned back into fuel), and that 1.6% ballpark, the idea that it's problematic that we're turning some farmland into solar doesn't pass the sniff test. Do you have any more info about that being a problem?

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#65

Post by dpkirchner »

gottorf wrote: post #48
oblio wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not paying for pollution we know they cause is an implicit subsidy, feels quite obvious.

Then the same "implicit subsidy" goes for literally every facet of human activity. Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process? Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet. It's a meaningles…

> Do builders of wind turbines and solar farms also pay commensurately for the pollution in the manufacturing and development process?

Sure, we can assign those costs to builders, why not? There's already lots of discussion about the true cost of EV batteries and how they're subsidized.

> Everything is implicitly subsidized because every action that any living being takes affects some other living being and the ecosystem as a whole, because we all live on the same planet.

Actions don't all have the same effect so I think it's totally fair to consider their true costs.

I think where it gets a little tricky is how you decide to assign costs to people that have children or are children. But that's really getting in the weeds.

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#66

Post by FpUser »

cortesoft wrote: post #14
imglorp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That saying that goes, we are the only species that will become extinct because survival wasn't profitable enough. To the systems point we really, really really, really really need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally. We have to stop making it profitable and encouraged by the system. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

I feel like we aren't actually unique in this respect, except in the sense that we are able to see our own doom but still not able to act on it. In essence, our extinction (if it were to happen) would be because we were unable to solve the collective action problem... each individual choosing their own best course dooms the entire species. When looked at it this way, lots of species go extinct for this reason; resour…

>"...individuals would need to sacrifice for the greater good of the species."

This old song. I am all for a sacrifice... As long as it starts from the top. Wake me up when that happens.

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#67

Post by nitwit005 »

schiffern wrote: post #4

Pioneering systems theorist Donella Meadows makes a highly salient point. The problem with BP isn't because there are "bad people" at the top, and the solution isn't to replace them with "good people." The problem is that the decision-makers are constrained to act a certain way . If they made different decisions then.... those people won't be the decision-makers anymore! The same is true for politicians, consumers, e…

I think you have to take the owner or investor view on this. Say you own a big portion of an oil company, and you decide renewable energy is the future. What do you do? Probably sell your shares and invest elsewhere.

Oil companies are full of oil experts. There's no reason to think they'll do well competing with companies full of renewable energy experts.

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#68

Post by netsharc »

Anyone got the math, there's something like x degrees C more warming already calculated as future profits by oil companies: they've seen the oil fields, they know how much they can extract, and that amount of oil, burned, will cause those x degrees of warming. Asking them to keep it in the ground is like asking them to give up some billions of dollars of future profit ..

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#69

Post by nradov »

david38 wrote: post #46
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> subsidizing fossil fuels to 7 trillion a year globally This is misleading. See https://www.slowboring.com/i/145942190/the-case-of-the-myste... > The vast majority of the “subsidies” are “implicit subsidies,” which include “undercharging for environmental costs.” In other words, they are characterizing governments’ failure to impose a carbon tax as a “subsidy” for fossil fuel use.

If I have to pay to clean up your mess to live in a world the way it was before you polluted it, it’s a subsidy

Before fossil fuels our cities were ankle-deep in horse shit, and when a horse died the owner dumped the carcass in the river. Some level of pollution is in inescapable price of civilization. We shouldn't be reckless or wanton about it but it's unreasonable and uneconomic to ever clean up all of the mess.

Re: BP abandons goal to cut oil output, resets strategy

#70

Post by stonogo »

nomel wrote: post #57
stonogo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think EVs are the 80% solution. They're great in cities and in suburbs. If you regularly make longer trips, they're a massive pain in the ass, primarily due to the poor-quality charging infrastructure. There are vast swaths of America where someone is already trucking gasoline and diesel to fuel stations but there's no reliable expectation of charging infrastructure of any kind, much less high-quality charging. It'…

> 80% of the solution In the US, only 39% of emissions are from fossil fuels used for transportation [1]. Where I am, around 60% of my EV power comes from natural gas plants that run at night, where electricity is 3.5x cheaper (electricity costs more than gas during peak hours where I am). With the lack of new nuclear, and the required 25-50% increase in our power grid, a quick (as in 20 year) change in EV adoption w…

I apologize for being insufficiently specific. I wasn't talking about a solution to climate change in general, but a 'solution' to getting rid of internal-combustion personal transport. What I was trying to say that current EVs are suitable replacements for personally-owned internal combustion vehicles for about 80% of use cases.
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