It makes a ton of sense if your focus is only short-term profit. It makes absolutely 0 sense if your goal is to try to decrease the legal liability of knowingly causing global warming and actively suppressing those internal studies to increase profits.
Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the sins of our fathers". Whereas Sawan is doubling down on "maximize this quarter, who cares about the future, not my problem".
That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? (or maybe grandchildren at the rate we're going)
If your view is that these companies are multi-decade sustainable businesses, then you want to invest in shoring up the firms' reputation and drilling new wells. If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.
> If your view is that all fossil fuel assets are headed towards zero over the next 3-4 decades, then you want to extract every last penny from the existing assets and move them into the pockets of shareholders.
I can not locate the long piece article now but I read a piece from someone that effectively got invited into a Shell (UK) think tank and heard exactly that from some vp/executive at a dinner table.
That they aimed to diversify (think corn/algae based fuels, hydrogen infrastructure, charging networks), but that they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades.
> public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades
I don't think it's public opinion so much as it is necessity to maintain current standards of living for the next few decades. Renewable energy is still a relatively small fraction of overall energy use, and net global oil consumption has been steadily increasing the past few years (likely to surpass pre-covid levels this year). Our society is still very much addicted to hydrocarbons.
I think we'll never stop extracting oil in the foreseeable future, we'll just be doing a lot less of it. There will always be corner cases where diesel or other oil derivatives (or NG) are the /only/ reasonable option for fuel.
Think generators for an antarctic station that can only use solar in certain months and wind isn't enough (or reliable enough)). Even if efficient electric commercial aviation at scale ever happens, you can bet military jets will still need jet fuel. I'm sure there's many others. Methane for rocket launches?
On top of fuel, there's also the use of some fraction of oil in industrial chemical processes to make lubricants and plastics. There may be other chemical processes that can do it without oil, but they may be too costly (in terms of other extractive processes for ingredients, or in terms of yield, not just energy).
The US military uses about 5% of the oil used in the US.
That's a lot, but if we only used oil in the US for the military, we'd still be using 95% less oil, and we'd also still be producing enough oil to have an economy of scale.
In any case, realistically speaking, we aren't coming for oil tomorrow. Instead, we need to come for coal immediately. If it takes us decades each time we cut our oil consumption in half, that's one thing... but the coal, that needs to stop sooner.
someone needs to tell China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe
> China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and Zimbabwe were the only countries that both added new coal plants and announced new projects. China accounted for 92% of all new coal project announcements.
Electricity is probably going to be an order of magnitude (or more) cheaper in 20 years, at least for bulk purchase in most fixed locations (not Antarctic winter.) The assumption that oil extraction is worthwhile is based on it being the cheapest way to get a unit of power. But if power is 1/10th what it costs now it is economical to do some process that has absurdly bad efficiency (10:1, even 100:1) to translate power into fuel that works in jets. That might just be making conventional jet fuel. But I doubt we will be extracting it from the ground.
I don't see any way electricity could fall anywhere near that much in 20 years. For that to happen, we either need a revolutionary decrease in the price of nuclear power, a radical improvement in the price of dependable renewable energy (probably involving a lot of batteries) or some hard AI takeoff that makes EVERYTHING cheaper.
Keep in mind that most countries are trying to electrify most parts of the economy, so we not only need to decarbonize the current electrical supply, but possibly 2-3 times that, if we are to replace NG for heating, steel and chemical industries, fertilizers and so on.
Keep in mind that even if the technology for producing windmills and batteries go down a lot, we still need a lot of new mining capacity to even have enough raw materials to produce those items. That alone could take 10-15 years to build out.
As long as you only consume it while the Sun is shinning, at the place of generation. This set of restrictions is allowing enough for a surprisingly large set of industrial applications (anything where energy costs are larger than capital ones).
In fact, we are not far from that. Solar is already a few times cheaper than the grid energy on those conditions.
My post was that electricity prices would come back by a factor of 10 or more. While that was qualified by "not Antarctic winter", it did not say that it would be only while the sun was shining, either.
That was what I objected to.
And if the average price falls by 90%, there number of industrial application where it would make sense to consume only part of the day, drops by a lot.
How do you see electricity getting 10x cheaper in 20 years? It sounds like people saying fission electricity would be too cheap to meter, and yet its some of the most expensive electricity we have in the US.
Yeah, just seeing the axle grease requirements and inventory on an aircraft carrier is a wakeup call. Our military is 110% reliant on oil to even function at all. The economic scale of consumer oil consumption and the petro-dollar are a key military concern to enable warfighting ability. When that sinks in, Iraq and Afghanistan make a lot more sense.
The US has plenty of oil and didnt need to go to those places to get more of it. We destroyed Iraqs oil pipelines and infrastructure in that war and a lot of it still is in need of investment in reconstruction today. Likewise Afghan oil production is a recent thing like in the last 10 years, and today the taliban government sells those mineral and oil extraction rights to chinese companies. If the goal was to get at those resources for American companies, we clearly failed. It seems China’s belt and road imperialism works better than our bomb the civilians and overthrow the government for a puppet method.
Global hydrocarbon consumption is down on a per capita basis. And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share. It's only the last year or two that renewable energy's share has become non-negligible. The EV transition is lagging the renewable energy transition, but it's happening too. EV's now have a non-negligible share of new vehicle sales, but since it takes ~20 years to turn over the global vehicle fleet, they still have a negligible share of the entire fleet. But that's changing, very slowly.
> And that's despite the fact that renewable energy and electric vehicles had a negligible share.
I could not disagree with this more. While China is a "developing" country, they are arguably making herculean efforts to move away from oil for transportation. They will drag the developed world along, as they will have built up all of this EV and electric scooter/bike/moped manufacturing capacity with only so much domestic consumption for it.
> Earlier this month, Chinese oil giant Sinopec made a surprise announcement that mostly flew under the radar. It’s now expecting gasoline demand in China to peak this year, two years earlier than its previous outlooks.
The main culprit? The surging number of electric vehicles on the road.
> China has been the largest driver of global growth for refined oil products like gasoline and diesel over the last two decades. But EV adoption rates in China are now soaring, with August figures likely to show plug-in vehicles hitting 38% of new passenger-vehicle sales. That’s up from just 6% in 2020 and is starting to materially dent fuel demand.
> Fuel demand in two and three-wheeled vehicles is already in structural decline, with BNEF estimating that 70% of total kilometers traveled by these vehicles already switched over to electric. Fuel demand for cars will be the next to turn, since well over 5% of the passenger-vehicle fleet is now either battery-electric or plug-in hybrid. The internal combustion vehicle fleet is also becoming more efficient due to rising fuel-economy targets.
I said "had", past tense. Most numbers still end in 2021, and EV's were a negligible fraction of the 1.5 billion vehicles on the road in 2021. Still are, but it's changing fast. 6 million EV's per year is a huge fraction of one year's vehicle sales but a tiny fraction of the entire 1.5 billion fleet.
Per capita metrics are useless when it comes to climate stats. The ice caps don't care about how much hydrocarbons are burned per person, they are only affected by the net amount of hydrocarbons burned on a global scale.
True, but it disproves the narrative that oil consumption must inevitably go up.
And if per capita consumption can go down in the 2010's when we had negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps, what'll it do in the 2020's when we have non-negligible amounts of wind, solar, EV's and heat pumps?
There were a lot of heat pumps in the 2010s (and before). There’s been a lot of attention and press about heat pumps recently, including some push for heat pumps as sole-source space conditioning, but they’re nowhere as new-tech as mass-market EVs or even the adoption of solar/wind/battery farms.
Well this whole first/second/third world nomenclature is not really pertinent in most cases but yes, I rank the parts of China that do buy cars as developped even though other parts of the same country is in a completely different state.
When I ran the numbers off of the actual CO2 emissions of the actual California grid, an EV created something like half the CO2 for a trip in the equivalent gas car.
The calculation wasn't straightforward though. And varies widely by locale.
EV mileage is reported in eMPG. Which means, "The miles you get when you charge the battery with the same energy as is in a mile of gasoline." The problem is that to deliver that much to the battery, you have losses at the charger, losses in the grid, and losses during power generation. None of which are counted in that figure. If your electric car is running off of a coal power plant, that 120 eMPG Tesla can easily perform about like a 30 MPG Camry. But as soon as you have a significant fraction of your grid being generated by renewables, now the electric car is running on a fraction of the CO2 emissions of the gas car.
In the end using a car is using a car. It takes an awful lot of energy to build, and then to move, more so often to transport only one or 2 persons, in a very short trip. It needs huge infrastructure that are energetically and financially costly to build and maintain.
All these needs to be cut down and EV won't help us. People need to be able to reach safely schools, workplaces, shops, restaurants by foot or by bike regardless of their age and fitness level.
What we help us is better infrastructure for non motorized vehicles, better public transport (even if they are not financially profitable), walkable spaces, security (with a density of human presence making sure we are safe, not useless cameras), transforming suburbs, commercial and social areas so there is no physical separation anymore between people and where they need/want to go and spend time, effectively bringing back the village/small town paradigm.
EV goes way way way way down the list and we should focus first on EV for public transport and transportation of good rather than personnal toys and vanity possession.
The EV crutch is getting really old. With current tech it is not a solution. Not even remotely.
It's great. I love the idea too. I would rather we stop driving around machines that belch out dangerous toxins but a mass migration to EVs will be disastrous. The manufacturers are going hybrid...which is a sensible transition. It should get people used to the freedom of producing/collecting their own energy. Hopefully they get addicted to that.
Condition people to view generating your own energy as "freedom." This will shift mindset about solar panels as "freedom." People will flock to hybrids, drastically cut C02 emmissions without spending more or needing decent charging infra. I'm sure others can go one and one with more advantages.
I fully agree with you but governments aren't exactly the ally on this one. Local and state governments in particular are losing out on tax revenue due to WFH. Lower attendance in offices (often in city centers) means less spending in those areas, so lower sales tax revenue. (I think New York City is projecting around $4500 less spending per worker annually.) Depreciating corporate property values means lower property tax revenue.
On the plus side we have the greatest effect on politics at the local level, if we get involved.
I think the bottom up approach to combat climate change is doomed to fail. We need to start top down. The most powerful institutions and people need to lower their living standards and resource extraction. Start with eliminating private jets for instance.
I guess my question is at what point does the decline in fossil extraction become self-reinforcing. If extraction is going down, firms won’t invest in developing new resources. This means constraints on supply leading to higher prices. That in turn will drive less consumption (particularly as non-fossil alternatives become mainstream.) There is a potential feedback loop here that drives things towards zero much more rapidly than you might imagine. Anyway, one can hope.
Make no mistake, oil will always be needed for many purposes, but some of the big consumption drivers are starting to have price competitive alternatives.
It’s notable that half of all global oil consumption is used on roads.
You can’t turn back the clock on the fact that many of these alternatives now cost less.
There are also little oddities, such as the impact on gas stations along common commuter routes. There are a lot of marginal stations on those routes now. In some places, you'd only have to lose a couple of stations for commuting to be an annoyance.
And commuter traffic is an obvious easy target for EV automakers, once they move out of more premium segments.
"they ultimately still believed that the public opinion would still make it palatable to continue hydrocarbon fuels extraction for another 2 to 3 decades"
And they are right. There are viable alternatives to gasoline cars now and people still buy gas powered vehicles. Most of Teslas success I think has not been so much due to the hunger for an electric vehicle but because of Tesla's cool factor, performance and design. The rest of the major vehicle manufacturers have essentially failed on the electric vehicle front.
Yes, I've found that to be the case. There are certainly people who buy Teslas and other EVs to save the planet.
But I don't think it is the majority. Most enjoy the cars for other reasons (lack of vibration, high torque, reduced gas station visits, lower operating cost and burden, cabin overheat protection, dog mode, preconditioning, etc).
Even among the environmental types, that often ends up being more of a fringe benefit.
Petrochemicals are never going to go to zero. We'll always need them. We won't always need to allow every person on the planet to burn them as fuel, but we will still need them to manufacture the many other products that aren't destroying the atmosphere.
But those executives need to pay for their yachts today, so the extraction strategy makes sense. It won’t be as valuable tomorrow as it is today, so they’re shorting it.
The earth as well as the value of their own companies.
Some 40% of the population is actively pro big oil and actively denies the carbon footprint causal links with climate change and warming.
You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?
Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion. If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
> Honestly, I think they’re all going to get away with it with zero repercussion.
Suppose for a moment that I completely agree with you on all points of substance. Even then, I would have to tell you that corporations are designed (not metaphorically, but literally designed) to deflect and shield liability. There never is anyone to be held accountable, because everyone who acts is an employee, and the ownership is divided among millions of people, through many layers of misdirection. None of whom make any decisions.
Unless you were careful, and if you have a 401K, you yourself may in fact be part owner. Or owner of an owner of an owner of an owner. Should you be held accountable?
You can't arrest a corporation. You can't put it in a holding cell overnight. You can't sentence it to prison for 10 years. You definitely can't give it the death penalty and execute it. And it's no accident this is the case. The major (and perhaps only real) difference between a corporation and simpler business customs is that the corporation is this magical wall between the owner and the business that can't usually be breached. If the business goes bankrupt, no one can seize the businessman's home as collateral. That's what a corporation is for. You live in a society that, however upset it might be over climate change, isn't upset at all over this "design". They like it. They revel in it. And it's not going away.
> If humanity is still around in a couple hundred years, there might be retroactive virtue signalling. But that doesn’t matter cause everyone responsible will be long since dead.
But that's already true from a pragmatic standpoint. Even the CEO now, he was hired in a few years ago, He's just some schlub taking the jobs he knows how to do, without any real power to change what you want. If he tried, they'd fire him and get another. The people who set the ball rolling made sure of that. And even they aren't guilty in any real way, either, unless you want to pretend that someone in the early 1900s should have known better.
Then civil forfeiture every dollar and every thing they own. For some reason police can do it to the poor, why not do the same for corporations and people making decisions there? Maybe executives are "not guilty", but their possessions doesn't have same rights as they do. So take it all away.
What you think is a harsh fine, even "everything they own" is nothing more than the cost of doing business. Even if you seize a few tens of billions of dollars, what's that compared to the trillions they've earned and paid out as dividends over the last century?
> For some reason police can do it to the poor,
Which is an interesting discussion if you wanted to have it, but is not even slightly relevant to this one.
What do you expect the police to do with oil rigs and tanker fleets and refineries and gas stations? What do you expect them to do with office buildings filled with conference rooms and thousand dollar conference room chairs?
Do you want to pile it into a big bonfire and burn it ironically? Do you put it in a landfill and bulldoze them under the ground? Do you want to sell that stuff on Craigslist yard-sale style for the next 60 years at a penny on the dollar?
Not to mention now you've put a 100,000 people out of work, probably more. I guess making them starve because they took a gas station job is justice in your mind.
> but their possessions doesn't have same rights as they do. So take it all away.
The interesting thing about "just fuck their rights" apoplectic outbursts like yours is, someone's likely to take you up on it someday. You're just likely to be the target more than whoever it is you think you hate.
The sad fact is that none of this can ever be fixed until some large fraction of humanity understands the problem. I've done my part, but you insist on remaining ignorant.
Price is set at the margin. Supply 100, demand 101 price goes up. Supply 100 demand 99 price goes down until supply and demand equalize.
75% of new electricity production is renewable. 10% of new car sales are EV's. A large fraction of new home heating installations are heat pumps. The three largest hydrocarbon demands are transitioning. That's going to have a meaningful effect on demand. It'll take decades to get anywhere close to zeroing demand, but it's going to have an effect on the margin quite quickly.
Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices? OPEC is trying but they're only a small and shrinking fraction of production and the gains from defection are so large...
> Can the companies & countries addicted to massive oil profits cut production quickly enough to stabilize prices?
If you look at the Brent Crude (oil) price chart and zoom out so you can see the last 10 years it's definitely not showing any sign of a long-term downward trend.
The world isn’t just the USA and Europe, and their proclamations aren’t the law of the world nor are they the world police. Nor do the majority of the Earth’s emissions come from developed countries.
Go ask some people in developing countries if they think they should sacrifice economic growth for climate change. The answer is going to be overwhelmingly no. The developing world also has the majority of the world’s population, so the global consensus actually belongs to them, not us.
I think what you'll find is if all the developed nations believe their very existence is at stake due to actions of the un-developed, it will result in war/the end of the threat very quickly.
Case in point: the fabricated idea that Iraq had chemical weapons that could hit western Europe. There wasn't a lot of debate on whether or not the western world was willing to eliminate the threat if it existed.
(note, I'm not trying to turn this into a discussion of the fabricated information, simply using it as an example that war is always on the table if a country feels its existence is in danger).
Is it still 40 percent? Seems much more evident now what's happening.
Maybe 40 percent is still pro big oil but they don't deny the causal link.
I'm pro big oil because I still drive a gas car. In that sense if you use big oil products you are a supporter. I would put supporters at over waaaaay over 40 percent. 95% is a better estimate.
That’s a weird way to put it. Driving a gas car doesn’t make you pro-big oil. Most of us are beholden to market pressures and have no realistic option.
Everyone still has to make their living, and they have to do it inside the elites construction of the market.
The elites didn't construct the market. You're just looking for someone to blame. The market came as an emergent property.
The elites are at fault as much as you and I are at fault. The story of oil is a human crisis caused by humanity itself. We like to blame specific groups but that's just not reality.
If this was true, then the for-profit fossil fuel industry wouldn't spend so much money on PR and political lobbying. They'd return that money to their shareholders instead.
> You think 20 years is enough for this reckoning?
20 years minus the latency inherent to the system. If I recall correctly the latency from "stopping to emit CO2" to "starting to see effects" is estimated to be 13 years.
Even if 100% of the global population was on board with getting rid of oil it would take more than 2 decades to lower demand by even 30% without causing massive decline in living standards.
The earth is getting warmer. To try to guilt people about it achieves nothing. The only action humanity can take at this point is to predict the effects of global warming and build infrastructure to slow it down, mitigate it or plan for the mass migrations.
I do believe that included in "only action" is: keep fossil fuels in the ground.
The idea that we can only mitigate is insane. Yes we've already signed up for a lot of pain as a civilization, but as long we keep burning fossil fuels we are looking at an increasingly worse future.
It's not like a smoker who has gotten lung cancer, where the best we can do is try to ease the pain, and more smoking won't really matter.
The biggest first step in preventing the worse case is to be able to point to an established oil field and say "that will never be extracted, and will remain in the earth for at least a 1000 years."
Every ton of carbon we can keep in the ground that way, the better of our future, even if that future is already slated to be bad.
We can slow down the use of fossil fuels, but as long as we are 8 billion people on the planet and we find no better way to produce ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, we will keep needing huge amounts of fossil fuels.
Personally, I feel that the solution is to gradually raise the tax rate on fossil fuels in order to disincentives their use and incentivize the production of alternatives. We've done this for cigarettes and it has worked. However, you will probably have the vaping equivalent of petrol that will come out and gain more marketshare.
The second solution is to make energy so cheap and abundant that petrol becomes unattractive.
To massively and suddenly restrict petrol use is a great way to start riots and ensure that your government will either be overthrown or has to descend into tyranny.
I would like to add a point that is rarely spelled out:
A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.
Wait until you see what climate change does with continued carbon emissions!
But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.
We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.
In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.
As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.
Without modern fertilizers which heavily rely on fossil fuels to produce, roughly half of the world population cannot be fed. Further, agriculture becomes much more labor intensive and we pretty much revert to the past where the majority of the population on earth were farmers. If you don't know how to farm effectively using past methods, you probably also get added to the "cannot be fed" list. That is a substantial immediate pain. I would much rather work to gradually reduce carbon emissions while mitigating the damage done.
I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
> I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
Oh, much worse.
First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.
But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].
He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.
One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.
All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.
Sounds like the classic trolley problem where your choice is to pull a lever and immediately kill half the world's population because 100 million kilometres away, the entirety of life on earth is comfortably resting on the train tracks. You're saying, let's pull that lever. I'm saying, let's organize a project to move the trolley tracks since we have ample time to do so. Sure some people will get hit by the trolley as it races by while the track is still being moved, but it sure beats killing 4 billion people in one fell swoop.
First off, I'm not saying "starting tomorrow now fossil fuels!", I'm saying you must keep fossil fuels in the ground to avoid worst case. And the start of that means you have to identify some fossil fuels that will never be extracted.
> since we have ample time to do so.
I seriously have no idea where you got that impression, but with climate change once you start feeling the effects you're already in the danger zone. We've already signed up for famine and potentially billions dead even if we had zero emissions today.
I do suggest you read up a bit more on the topic. No serious research around climate change would claim we have "ample time".
The bigger question is: how close are we to climate "tipping points". We do know that geologically it seems there are points where positive feedbacks start accelerating climate change rapidly. We just don't know where the line is for those tipping points.
If we seriously want to avoid extinction of the species we should already be starting to strategize a schedule of what fossil fuels reserves we promise to keep in the ground, and what we're going to do about future discoveries.
To be honest, I don't really think we will do this, but if we wanted to survive at all we should start talking about it very seriously.
Steel and concrete aren't necessary for the most part: other materials that don't emit (or even actively sequester) carbon are available and have been for a long, long time. It doesn't even preclude building densely either: just look at cross laminated timber.
We're going to build bridges and trains and rails and roads and ships out of cross laminated timber?
And yes, you can build pretty tall structures out of CLT, but there's still smaller than what you can build with steel and concrete. The tallest one built that I know of is 25 stories. But at least 6 or so of those floors are all concrete+steel, and it still uses concrete+steel emergency stairwells.
But what is the foundation made from? What do you think the elevator shafts are made from? Its not like its 100% wood. I would like to see more CLT construction, and modern building codes are allowing taller and larger stick construction as well, but arguing that steel and concrete aren't necessary is ignoring all the rest of the things supporting that structure along with all the other things that still need steel and concrete. How did all the building materials arrive at the site? What harvested the wood? What were the machines making the CLT made out of? What are the fireproof stairwells usually made out of? Steel and concrete.
We'll probably see more and more construction which looks like this, where some CLT offsets some concrete and steel, but chances are the whole building isn't entirely wood:
Using modern materials and building codes can let us reduce our usage of things like steel and concrete for more buildings, but its not going to fully eliminate their usage in our world.
As for the rest, I was referring to buildings. I don't think anything is so worthy of being built that wrecking the environment is a fair trade. Railways are an honourable exception, since they displace (far more wasteful) cars. Light rail is especially good for this.
The fact is that we need to question what we build, as well as the materials used to build it.
The future is pointing to the end of these companies. Shell is maximizing its returns before the end.
It is the most long term outlook you can get. What's more important?a future where my children are billionaires or a future with slightly less global warming? Shell is not the only source of global warming on this earth.
You need to think in terms of human scale choices. Not just simplistic right or wrong choices. If we were that ceo... You, I and all of us maximize our benefits and make the most rational and most logical choice by destroying the environment.
It's the tragedy of the commons pushed to the maximum extreme. I make a shit load of money participating in the destruction of the commons. We'd all be lying to ourselves if we didn't make that choice.
If you think about it from the corporate perspective it also makes sense. The company is heading towards a wall. Not just environment pressures, but a future where oil is dry. We are running out. In the face of an inevitable end what is the best most rational choice? It's obvious.
It's not the "tragedy of the commons," it's capitalism. They're opposite things. The "commons" were fenced in and taken from the public by private entities. In the same spirit, a healthy environment and stable climate system are being taken from all of us by private corporations. I would argue, in fact, that if the public had control over these resources, we would govern ourselves in a far different manner that would not lead towards such a bleak future simply because we are motivated by short-term profits.
Elinor Ostrom has written an excellent book called "Governing the Commons," and she was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. I recommend it.
I mean, I do, but that doesn't actually matter. I ride my bicycle and take the bus, but there are places I can't visit on a bike or a bus because, through a series of intentional policy decisions that primarily benefit capitalists, towns are designed with long stretches of road that accomodate cars over all other forms of transportation. Car manufacturers and oil companies have made a lot of money off of arranging society this way.
Not Just Bikes has a good video on the propaganda car companies were pushing in the 50s here, which played a large part in creating the unprecented design of suburban America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94-_yE4IeU&t=1060s
Ah yes. The famous capitalists who caused famine in Easter Island and told Chinese people to decimate the forests of China to fuel the smelting of small quantities of pig-iron.
Ostrom didn't debunk the tragedy of the commons. She merely suggests a framework that would avoid it, which has never been tested at the scale of 7 billion people trying to solve global warming.
And yeah, sure I'm not here to defend Mao's policies. But an authoritarian state is not at all related to a collective of people managing resources, so I'm not sure why you're even bringing it up?
That doesn't really change that there used to be a lot of forest and larger animals that could have supported a more fulfilling diet that were extinct by the time the Europeans arrived. If society as we know it collapses due to climate change, the people who do survive would also "practice resiliency, cooperation, and perhaps even a degree of environmental stewardship."
> But an authoritarian state is not at all related to a collective of people managing resources
Mao didn't exactly have the resources to enforce a 1984 style or even North Korean style authoritarianism. The authoritarianism was very much enforced by a collective of people. People genuinely wanted to support Mao, which is why they hid how terrible his policies were from him and continued their support for him afterwards.
> What's your vision of a better society?
I think overly reductionist ideas like "capitalism bad" and "Mao authoritarian" end up causing problems like the Great Leap Forward did. Any solution to any societal problem requires a deep understanding across multiple domains, which to be fair is what Ostrom suggests. To be clear, I don't think that it's really anyone's fault, but rather most people don't actually care about the issues to put the work into studying or taking action to them in any meaningful capacity.
Big oil and big tobacco share a strategy of promoting false skepticism, shifting blame to consumers, using the legal system to harass and intimidate scientists, and lobbying to get support from elected representatives. Big oil is of course bigger, and the entanglement with politics, jobs and other companies in the private sector is much stronger.
These issues are widely documented, and the books that climate scientist Michael Mann wrote were eye opening to me.
The only sensible exit is to legislate at scale. These companies will not self regulate. The lag between cause and effect makes this extremely dangerous. A heavy carbon tax is an obvious way to do it.
I think you are missing something. Where is what they will do:
1. Spin off green energy products into their own company.
2. Pour money from oil business into Green energy.
3. When reckoning comes for gas, they let the oil biz take the fall, but the fall won't be much as they will have nearly bankrupted it already.
Of course, the board of shell can just delay the legal responsibility until all of them are ghosts – then they've won and their next generation can just inherit their yachts to stay on top of (literally) the rising sea.
I think the notion is that if you control enough capital, you'll be able to relocate yourself and your family to those parts of the planet that are least impacted by the consequences of continued fossil-fueled global warming.
This also points to the problem with renewables from the capital viewpoint: they're just not as profitable, as you can't sell sunlight and wind or create artificial supply restrictions to jack up prices (which is the historical economic story of the oil & gas industry over most of the 20th century).
I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue (I am not implying in anyway that they are the good guys here) What would happen to society if tomorrow all oil companies just said the risk of global warming is too great, we are all shutting down. Society would collapse.
Its not so much they are doing this for profits; which of course they are, but society as a whole very much needs them to continue to do so in order to assure our continued existence in our current form.
There is no regulation proposed, or method proposed, to substantively reduce how much co2 is emitted when you burn fossil fuels for power. That is why this problem is so hard. You can't put a filter in place like you can for heavy metals or particulates. There is no solution other than switching to nuclear/solar/wind/etc
And those solutions can be enforced by regulation. But when you get regulation like generation shifting, corporations and the political right wing collude to say that the regulations are unconstitutional.
This assumes that governments will trend towards more stability and the ability to enforce this regulation. The latter depends on alternative energy costs trending downward and competing for viability on a larger scale.
None of these things are necessarily true. In fact from the government stability perspective we've been in an unparalleled period of peace and stability that looks incredibly shaky into the near future.
Any climate commitments go completely out the window when conflict breaks out between nations.
This is not an Oil company issue though, this is a voter issue. If voters were concerned about global warming and wanted everything electric they would vote that way. Instead it appears that only about half want it or at least vote in a way that supports it. Others may support it as well but see other issues as more important and vote accordingly. Until the voting public actually acts like this is a major deal, it will be business as usual.
> But when you get regulation like generation shifting, corporations and the political right wing collude to say that the regulations are unconstitutional.
The argument wasn't that they're unconstitutional, it's that they weren't authorized by Congress. To have the law you have to actually pass the law.
First, "created in a way outside of the federal government's enumerated powers" is a kind of unconstitutionality.
But the argument was bullshit. Major Questions Doctrine just exists to say "nu uh, that authorization you have from Congress doesn't count" when it is politically expedient. The Clean Air Act exists. Congress passed it. Roberts just thinks that the law shouldn't be able to do anything controversial but there is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress' delegation authority is limited only to uncontroversial things.
> First, "created in a way outside of the federal government's enumerated powers" is a kind of unconstitutionality.
It wasn't that either. It was the courts saying that the law Congress passed didn't clearly authorize the EPA to do this, so if Congress wants it they need to say so unambiguously.
Notably this means that to change it doesn't require a constitutional amendment but only an ordinary law, which is not what is generally meant by "unconstitutional".
> The Clean Air Act exists. Congress passed it.
And then the courts interpret it and if Congress doesn't like their interpretation they can pass a new law which is more specific.
> Roberts just thinks that the law shouldn't be able to do anything controversial but there is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress' delegation authority is limited only to uncontroversial things.
There is absolutely nowhere in the Constitution that says that Congress even has delegation authority.
"Is unconstitutional" does not mean "would require a constitutional amendment to exist."
Yes, Congress can pass a new law. That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.
Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.
> "Is unconstitutional" does not mean "would require a constitutional amendment to exist."
It kind of does. Your version would make any interpretation of the law a constitutional question. The plaintiff in a civil case claims they're entitled to damages but the court found their argument unconstitutional because it's Congress and not plaintiffs who make the law?
> That doesn't make the supreme court's decision absolutely fucking rank idiocy based entirely in political goals covered in the thinnest veneer of jurisprudence.
It feels pretty consistent with a "separation of powers" interpretation of how laws get made. Do you really think they come to a different result if it was Trump's EPA saying they had to replace renewables with "reliable" generation methods over whatever pretext? And wouldn't that be the result you want?
> Yes, Gorsuch thinks that Congress can't delegate at all and basically all execute agencies should be destroyed. We know. He'll ride out climate change in a mansion.
They could exist without making laws. Agency drafts a bill, proposes it to Congress, Congress votes on it. It's democratic.
It seems like people have forgotten how to compromise. You want a climate change bill, Republicans don't. Republicans want school vouchers, or to reduce the number of federal employees, or immigration reform, or lower taxes. You give them something they want, you get something you want.
> It kind of does. Your version would make any interpretation of the law a constitutional question.
I don't think that's true. Consider a case that is doing statutory interpretation to resolve a conflict between two federal laws. There is no question about the constitutional authority of Congress or any other body here.
> Do you really think they come to a different result if it was Trump's EPA saying they had to replace renewables with "reliable" generation methods over whatever pretext?
Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other. Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.
> It seems like people have forgotten how to compromise. You want a climate change bill, Republicans don't.
And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.
> I don't think that's true. Consider a case that is doing statutory interpretation to resolve a conflict between two federal laws. There is no question about the constitutional authority of Congress or any other body here.
There was no question about the constitutional authority of Congress in the other case. They were interpreting the Clean Air act and concluded it didn't enable the EPA to do this.
> Yes. The Supreme Court is a political body, like any other.
They generally try to avoid political issues and punt them to the elected branches.
> Notably, West Virginia v EPA took on a regulation that had already been reversed by the Trump administration.
'The case was not rendered moot when the Biden administration took over in 2020, as the EPA under the Biden administration stated their inclination to include "outside the fence line" controls, making the case still relevant to the authority the EPA had in interpreting their Congressional charter.' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA)
> And yet, the Clean Air Act exists. Congress could edit it or repeal it if they wanted.
You keep saying "the Clean Air Act exists" but the question is what it authorizes the EPA to do.
They could pretty easily impose costs on fossil fuel generators that make them uncompetitive and thereby cause a switch to other generation methods, but that would raise energy costs for consumers in the meantime, which would be unpopular. So they wanted to do something else, but the something else wasn't a thing the law authorized the EPA to do, so if you want that you need to change the law.
> I think its deeper than that. Its not an oil company issue.
> Its not so much they are doing this for profits
Funding a massive climate change denial movement in the US for decades, consequently eating up our limited window of time to make the kinds of societal changes to avoid the worst consequences of climate change is very much an "oil company issue" that is done exclusively for profit.
Exactly. You me and everyone who drives or consumes basically anything are part of the problem. You can’t put all the blame on them. However where they are to blame is denying the science to the public for years. Had they invested in clean tech years ago we would be much better off.
Do you realise that the Rockerfellers (famous oil scions) organised the environmental movement into what we have today, via people like Maurice Strong (himself an oil entrepreneur). There is a good argument to be made that the environmental movement is a creation of 'big oil'.
Respectfully, this seems like moving the goal posts.
Energy companies and governments are best positioned to hedge against future consequences of burning oil. It's exactly because we depend on them for a certain standard of living that they can shepherd change, but they serve stock prices not society.
It's a leadership problem where the actors with the most knowledge and resources to combat the problem can hide behind a version of "it's too big to fail" and then when it all falls apart leave everyone in the wind.
It's infeasible and unreasonable to think that in order to criticize and advocate for a change in society, that person needs to be outside of it. Having an iPhone doesn't change any of what they are saying.
The impact of the plastic material for those products is a fraction of the energy required to make them and run our modern life. Clean power and getting rid of fossil fuels that are burned for energy is the most important thing here.
Nah, it’s the companies that lobby to maximize profit. Cities used to be human scale, but cars took over the streets.
Now we know thousands of people die every year in car accidents but it isn’t a priority for governments because freedom to give a shitload of money to oil and car companies matters more than human life.
Nobody said oil was going away entirely. But we're well past the point we should still be burning it for locomotion or power. And given what we're seeing with microplastics, we should probably be rapidly trying to move back to glass where appropriate for home supplies.
No. The decision of any individual consumer will always be millions of times less impactful than the decisions of the leaders in these organizations. They should be held to account - not the individual buying what they need to get through life.
The leaders of these organizations are producing oil. That’s not illegal or bad in itself and on the whole petroleum products have made the world a better place by lifting hundreds of millions of people’s living standards and saving/extending lives.
They may save lives but their price will be based on supply and demand and the demand will be based on the price of alternatives. If pricing in the negative externalities causes their price to exceed that of alternatives demand will plummet.
Demand is inelastic for oil so you’ll just end up with inflation. Ordinary people just trying to heat their homes and drive to work will probably be hit the hardest.
I seriously believe it. Climate change will almost certainly lead to food insecurity and political upheavals, leading mass migration and war, not to mention potential knock-on effects where, for example, photosynthesis reductions due to extreme heat at the equator, rapid rates of methane release as permafrost melts, mass death in a heating and acidifying sea...
. really there are just so many things that could go wrong, much more wrong. So yes, we should be very serious, and very scared.
What are you using to measure "environmental knowledge"? Do the hundreds of scientists who drafted the IPCC report count as knowledgeable? Does the report sound anxious ?
> Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years
I think a lot of people feel that.
Personally, I think we may more or less have forgotten about "Global Warming" in 20 years, just like we forgot about the "Ozone Layer" or "Acid Rain".
If AI continues at anything resembling the current pace for another decade or two , there may be so much disruption, that Global Warming seems quite insignificant to most people.
Small difference: we banned chemicals responsible for ozon layer disruption, similar situation with acid rain (talking about 1st world with rain). So it's not like we forgotten, more like it's a non-issue now. Global warming is only going to get worse.
How much net real harm to humanity do you think global warming causes today? (If we ingnore psychological harm caused mostly by the scare tactics used to prevent it)
According to this article, total excess mortality from cold weather is still an order of magnitude higher than from hot weather:
As the world has been warming over the last decades, mortality from cold weather has been declining faster than the mortality from warm weather has increased.
This is from Europe, but prior studies have been conducted that produce the same results globally:
So my claim is that global warming is also in reality a non-issue right now, even though it could in theory become a big issue in about 100-200 years, if we don't do anything.
I think the reason why Global Warming gets so much attention right now, is partly that we have few other serious issues to worry about right now, and partly because some groups have chosen to put it on the agenda.
Few people alive today actually remember WW2, and even the Cold War and the Nuclear Scare is becoming a distant memory.
So my prediction is NOT that the real threat of Global Warming will necesarily go away, but rather that something (like AGI) will appear that makes it seem insignificant by comparison.
Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
Climate related deaths have declined by 98% over the last century.
> Average life expectancy has increased because child mortality is down, do we stop medical research?
You are 50x less likely to die of a climate-related cause than in 1920.
> Great. Let's keep investing in mitigation AND prevention. It seems to work!
8x as many people die from cold temperatures as warm ones.
> Climate change is not just global WARMING.
The planet is more green today than a century ago. CO2 is plant food.
> At the cost of loss of biodiversity. We don't just need green, but diverse green.
We need more energy, not less. Renewable, nuclear, and yes even fossil fuels.
> Agreed. (Surprise!) But I'd prefer to see fossil used for industry and not energy. Renewable & nuclear should be sufficient.
It brings people out of poverty and increases standard of living. When humans move up Maslow's hierarchy they start to care about the environment. CO2 emissions have been decreasing in the US since 2007.
> Agreed. Moving up people on Maslow's hierarchy also causes them to need to have less kids (in a sane environment with a good social safety net for old age) which should stabilise the population by 2060.
I don't think they are dismissive points. I think specially the ending makes a whole lot of sense to me. I'd give negative shits about the environment if I struggled for food or housing or basic essentials.
The same way the best way to tackle crime is through better education for the people, getting the existing people out of poverty might be the single best thing we can do to have them realize the impact, reproduce less, and contribute to a solution. I also think this way ends up being pragmatic because it doesn't require "so we change everyone's minds" as step 1.
They're not just dismissive, they're pretty obviously bad faith arguments. "CO2 is plant food" is a classic climate denier talking point that you hear from your crazy uncle on Facebook, who's parroting something they heard from a pundit on Fox News.
Water is also plant food, but that's not a helpful piece of information if you're in a flood. The world is releasing 97 million barrels of gasoline into the atmosphere per day.
I guess I don't see what other option we have other than drill baby drill. Yes we're killing our planet but renewable aren't able to provide the energy we need at scale. Switching to 100% renewables and not drilling means increased oil prices and ultimately less consumption across the board. Less food, less driving, less heat, less AC. We'd all have to give up a lot and no one is signing up for that. There's this magical thinking that we can switch to renewables and keep everything the same or that it only be a minor speedbump but that's nonsense. Switching to 100% renewables means redefining modern life as we know it in a way that involves a whole lot less materialism/consumerism for everyone.
why can't we do nuclear with plugin hybrids in urban areas. the federal government , which, as an issuer of money, can afford anything, unlike states/municipalities, should massively fund nuclear to save the environment meet energy demands. seems like such a no-brainer.
Because the free market is not willing to bear the risks - even when you ignore the whole "nuclear waste" and "meltdown" part. The construction costs are extremely high and basically guaranteed to wildly exceed initial estimates, while electricity price is highly volatile.
The only way companies are interested in building reactors is by having a guaranteed government subsidy. For example, Sizewell C in the UK has negotiated a guaranteed electricity price of £119 / MWh. The long-term electricity spot price in the UK for 2013-2021 is closer to £70, so taxpayers have to pay an additional £49 / MWh in subsidies. Good luck selling that to the nuclear-skeptic taxpayers.
Governments like the US federal gov, who are currency issues can afford anything . Where did the 7 trillion dollar covid spending come from ? What we cannot afford is to do nothing and maintain the status quo. Federally funded nuclear with plug in electric is the path to prosperity.
Feels like the oil companies are going to face a big tobacco moment in the next 20 years and the previous CEO was preparing their defense of "don't punish us for the sins of our fathers". Whereas Sawan is doubling down on "maximize this quarter, who cares about the future, not my problem".
That's all ignoring the: do you actually care at all if your great grandchildren have a habitable planet? (or maybe grandchildren at the rate we're going)