This was official US policy for much of the post-war era and a large part of the reason the US encouraged the development of oil fields in the Gulf.
In WWII the Allies deeply learned the benefits of having vast, safe oil resources in lands untouchable by the enemy. US policy after the war called for encouraging foreign development, especially by the US majors, in order to keep our reserves in tact for the next war.
Can't speak to the second part, but I came here to post the first part. tl;dr There's nearly a trillion dollars of oil to sell at today's prices, but it's not "worth" anywhere that much in net because drilling it is not nothing.
These things always amaze me, $900B which, if they extracted it all at once would deflate the price of oil to less than $10 a barrel and make everyone go broke.
For reference the US consumed 7 billion barrels in 2015[1] so this represents basically nearly 3 years of consumption by the US with no imports at all. And world consumption has been nearly flat for a while.
That statement is false. It entirely depends on how fast you sell it. If you dump it all on the market at once, it can go way way below $10. Or you can take it slow and not affect the price much at all.
Any idea what the expected reaction would be if you sold it slowly but everyone knew that you had a massive reserve sitting in a warehouse somewhere ready for sale?
Technically the statement is accurate, but I understood that you disagreed with the hypothetical.
That said, there is a lot of evidence and history that supports the notion that OPEC only managed to keep oil prices high by threatening member states with retaliation if they under cut the "standard" price. And at the same time, people who were in a position to undercut that price (Venezuela, Russia, Brazil) did so in order to get more foreign currency faster.
It is always a balance of incentives. The market clearly will buy oil at lower prices if given the opportunity.
So one could imagine an act of economic warfare where the oil and gas reserves were developed as quickly as possible and shipped to Europe at a steep discount to cut into the revenues Russia makes selling oil and gas. Thus putting a huge crimp in their economy which makes their military spending cut into their social programs more deeply causing internal unrest and dissatisfaction.
That certainly would not be in the best interests of the companies pulling the oil out of the ground, but it could be in the best interests of the US policy makers.
My original point was that the $900B number was specious, you cannot take the 'estimate of reserves in barrels' x 'the spot price of oil' and call it the 'value'. The quantity is material to the commodity price on the market and so moving it through the market will change the net value.
Eh, the way I see it, this whole thing with the "fake news" (because propaganda's a dirty word), is more about willful ignorance and the insulation and maintenance of unsophisticated world views.
I feel like there's something more interesting going on here. Like, more to the point that there's this unstoppable reality that people are reading the stories they find attractive.
Whether the goal of the stories was to game a compensation system, by forming a click-bait content-farming advertisement ring, and whether it was a plan hatched by two-bit amateurs doesn't matter as much as the premise that many, many people are susceptible to preferring a channel that happily conforms to the ideas that seem to please them, without questioning why it always provides them with everything they've always agreed with.
Is the problem that someone out there is creating junk food popcorn stories that people smoke crack and read avidly? Or is the problem that people are smoking crack before they read the news?
Seems like it's an easier solution to hunt down those rotten unethical publishers. But after you get rid of the publishers, you still have this sprawling kingdom of crack addicts, so did anything really get fixed?
Like, certain people prefer to hear that we have this amazing trillion dollar oil field now, whether it's worth that much or not. So that's what gets published.
Meanwhile, the valuation of the huge, bigly oil field is a digression from the more pressing conversation about whether we should ever burn all that oil to begin with.
Like, yeah, wow. Lots of oil. Great. But uh, what about all the smog and that business with the greenhouse gases? Weren't we supposed to start using less oil?
But never mind all that! What gets clicks is the price tag! Run it!
Frankly, I resent the trend to call anything one disagrees with or find some problem with "fake news". Fake news is specific phenomenon and this has nothing to do with it.
True that the 900B estimate is nothing to do with actual monetary value of the deposit - it's just a size estimate expressed in terms most understandable by common person. Maybe it is misleading - though quantifying "a real lot of oil" to make it comprehensible is not an easy task, and writing "well, there's lots of oil but we have no idea if we can get to it and how much would that cost" is a bad headline. But the correction that 900B figure is just a sort of "car analogy" to estimate the size and not the actual worth is true. It does not mean original article is "fake news" - it's true news, just using one somewhat misleading illustration.
I didn't find the headline misleading. It's no different than when people say there's $10 trillion in platinum out in some asteroid. People understand there are extraction costs.
I'm pretty sure you have the best intentions but I think you're making a critical mistake here. There is a distinct difference between insufficiently researched news or biased news (likely what we have here) and propaganda (aka "fake news"). The legitimization of propaganda sources is an enormously serious problem which shouldn't be watered down by confusing it with other journalistic problems.
Keep in mind that this is oil which needs to be horizontally drilled for, meaning fracking. Fracking has destroyed water tables because of the chemicals used and been linked to earthquakes in Canada. Not to mention that it is very intensive in terms of water use.
But of course, while the oil is running there are lots of jobs created, at least until OPEC decides they've had enough and drives the price of oil back down.
Since this is Texas, I'm pretty sure the local community won't worry about this stuff much (I grew up in Texas and have relatives who live just north of this field's extent). Hopefully the benefits will outweigh the costs for them -- it's not clear that this has been the case for North Dakota.
Given the water situation in most of Texas, I find it unbelievable that anyone is still pushing oil, especially shale oil, as an energy option anywhere in Texas. And, yet, all those old oil barons are still pushing that agenda, and still controlling the narrative at every level of government.
That same desert could house miles of solar panels and miles of wind farms. But, very few people are pushing that solution to the energy problem, even though it is now price-competitive with fossil fuels to do so in places like Texas, where both wind and sun are plentiful almost year round.
You might be vastly underestimating how much land oil extraction uses. It depends on how they'll be extracting this shale oil from this particular shale oil field, which I don't know. In some cases, it is massively land intensive; it is akin to strip mining in that vast tracts of land are dug up. In other cases, it is just massively water intensive, as they pump a water and chemical blend at high temperature underground and then pump it back out to pull the shale slurry out with it.
Shale oil is a very different process than traditional oil wells, and much riskier to water reservoir resources in the region.
I've never seen a finished well take much land at all. For most 600 acre sections of land, even multiple wells on that land would take up an acre or two at most. Fracking itself takes more space just to bring in the equipment and water tanks. But after it is fracked, at most there is a "christmas tree" and a few water tanks.
As for the extra space for fracking, most states require returning the land back to how it was before after the few month process of fracking is done.
The "a few water tanks" is the bit that adds up - open air surface storage pools are far more commonly used than tanks, and as the aim is to get the used fluid to evaporate, rather than trucking it away, you optimise for maximal surface area. I know that's not the intended course of action, but it's a common resource extraction strategy - disposing of waste properly is an expense that can be avoided by making your waste magically disappear.
Thing is, in many places it rains, and the waste water doesn't evaporate, it just remains until a government body cleans it up or the pool membrane ruptures and it enters the water table - many smaller operators wind up after extraction, and leave their tailings for the EPA to deal with, and reincorporate and move on to the next parcel. Again, not just fracking - applies to a lot of stuff where waste is produced.
So, while in a perfect world fracking uses little land, in reality, it uses rather a bit - and is being heavily state subsidised both directly and indirectly.
All of that said, a silver lining might be that wellhead sites end up too polluted to be used for anything but solar farms.
> many smaller operators wind up after extraction, and leave their tailings for the EPA to deal with, and reincorporate and move on to the next parcel. Again, not just fracking - applies to a lot of stuff where waste is produced.
There is an easy way to protect from after-effects: the government must mandate that a specific percentage of revenue be set aside in a trust or other impartial entity (government itself doesn't count, because government funds are always open to be tapped for other purposes). This money is at the end either used by the government to fund restoration if the operator goes belly-up, or refunded to the operator.
There is actually quite a fair number of windmills in this area. Wind energy has been in the basin for decades if you were to drive through the area you will actually see more windmills than pumpjacks in some parts. Solar is starting to catch up, but neither of these could compete with the profits offered by petroleum when oil was over $100/barrel.
Oil doesn't have the same use cases as electricity. Until we have electric planes, ships, heavy trucks, farm equipment and freight trains, there is still a big place for oil in transportation.
Also, until we get some good energy storage solutions, we are just going to run into the same problems of too much electricity during the middle of the day and not enough in the evening.
I expect that to be dependent on location. Near coasts, for example, the physics driving sea and land breezes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind#Sea_and_land_breezes) will either increase or decrease wind speed depending on local prevailing winds.
It also can depend a lot on height (very important for wind turbines)
With cheap enough electricity you can make artificial hydrocarbons.
The process is not as efficient as batteries (or just burning oil products found in the ground), but you get similar energy densities as the normal hydrocarbons. After all, the chemistry is the same.
I just wish we had functioning carbon tax or carbon emission markets. Then the government could just set the price or volume, and the market could figure out the most cost-efficient energy mix to hit the target.
Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are two different processes. Horizontal drilling is just that, drilling in a horizontal direction. Fracking is injecting a liquid to break up and dissolve a rock formation to access the crude.
Yes and no. They're not mutually exclusive, but you can use one without the other and they are often used in conjunction. It just depends on what the engineers decide is the most practical way to extract the oil.
I realize it may sound petty, but I wanted people to know that they are two completely different processes. It's a lot like hearing someone confuse JavaScript with Java. Easy and understandable mistake but two very different animals.
More like confusing React and Redux. Horizontal drilling (React) without fracking (Redux) is pretty common, but it's pretty rare to frack without horizontal drilling.
Indeed - I'd say this is close enough for the lay person. I've been on many vertical wells that were fractured (out side of the US), but that is mostly irrelevant to what is being discussed. It is certainly true that shale gas was only cost effective due to horizontal drilling + fracking.
Or their internal divisions spiral out of control as Gulf petrostates receive the double-punch of declining oil revenues and weakening security alliances, causing them lose the ability to buy off their own citizens while at the same time, foreign powers lose their need for the current regimes.
I live in this neck of the woods, Midland is 30 minutes away and I often am in town to work or play. On the one hand, I'm kinda glad that the oil is there, those are big numbers especially considering that the price per barrel is half of what is was two years ago. It will definitely boost the local economy. On the other, we are just now starting to see the area begin to settle down from the influx of workers who came to the area for jobs. When oil is booming crime goes up, housing costs go up, and traffic gets dangerous. Not to mention all the water that gets wasted from fracking. Water restrictions were just lifted but the area cannot support more people for long. Groundwater is being contaminated and soon what little above ground water sources we have will run dry if the area continues to see growth, add to this the fact that the shale formations will need to be broken up (by fracking) to access the crude and it looks like even more water will be used, as well as increase the possibilities of sinkholes and seismic activity throughout the entire basin. This is not going to be enjoyable for the locals.
It depends on the quality of the water. Where I live there's too much chlorine in it (nothing harmful but I brew beer so I need good water) and a 30$ brita filter seals the deal. In places with really shitty water distillation is a good place to start.
I imagine (from looking at it briefly) that it would not even nearly come close to the effectiveness of fracking. It looks very similar to water jet fracking - which doesn't work very well either
There are just a few acre-feet of water actually used per well. The remainder should be treated and returned; there just isn't that much water out there.
But with frack companies hanging by their teeth it isn't clear that this will be done.
This is a solvable problem but market conditions and the people left in the industry my not support it very well. It's not exactly a hotbed of technological innovation.
Texas drilling and fracking regulations are on the chopping block. Soon we'll have little to no leverage to limit drilling or demand environmental studies to be done, so get ready for even more indigenous lands to get violated, even more earthquakes caused from wastewater injection, and even more greenhouse gasses released into our atmosphere exacerbating the already terrifying effects of climate change. No matter how good the profit in the near future might be, we're jeopardizing our ability to live on this planet by allowing this to happen.
Or some real jobs and money in these dirt poor areas.
> even more greenhouse gasses released into our atmosphere
Any working solution to that has to be global and reduce demand. Refusing to drill American oil mostly means more oil money to Saudis, Putin, Venezuela and other of the worst butchers and oppressors of the world.
Having a pipeline built through your lands usually doesn't bring you any jobs, or money.
The people building it come from out of town, the people who will be making money from the pipeline are its owners, and the people who will be picking up the bill if things go pear-shaped will be the people who live there.
If you have any doubts about that, check out how the Exxon Valdez spill was handled. The oil company makes the profits, and can find all sorts of ways to get out of paying for the damages.
So you would rather us directly fund oppressionist governments around the world, just so you can feel better for the 50 people living in the town next door to the oil fields? Ok.
Not bad, considering they're having to pump seawater down their wells just to get any oil back up. They're running out and they'll be broke within a decade.
Our government already does support oppressive oil regimes (the saudis). You see those other governments as substantially worse because the only thing you read is american propaganda.
> Having a pipeline built through your lands usually doesn't bring you any jobs, or money.
Are you saying the land owners don't get paid?
Besides, this is primarily about oil wells, not pipelines. I know having oil wells on your land can be very lucrative.
> If you have any doubts about that, check out how the Exxon Valdez spill was handled
That was a one of a kind, history changing event in the arctic ocean decades ago. It's hard to think it's typical of rural Texas in the 2020s.
"The rich bastards will always screw you" is a fine sentiment over a beer in a country bar, but not a great analysis to to base trillion dollar decisions on.
There are no Indian reservations around San Angelo that I'm aware of.
There are three that I can find, one is in east Texas, one is in Maverick County on the Rio Grande, the third and last one I could find is in El Paso. None of these are co-extensive with the find that borders San Angelo and Lubbock.
>No matter how good the profit in the near future might be
Absolutes won't further your goals. Excess capital is what funds companies like Tesla.
All headed by 70 year old rich men and politicians who won't be around to suffer the long-term environmental consequences. And look at the age demographics where most of their votes come from.
Yet everyone acts like it's a monstrous proposition when I state that voting power should be weighted based on age rather than location like it is today. Not that it matters, it's never going to change.
You mean, like less you know, less real life experience you have - more voting weight you get? Brilliant idea, that's what is missing in our politics - more immaturity, childishness and inexperience!
I said it wouldn't be a popular sentiment. But as they say, democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding on what to have for dinner.
Some rise above it, but human nature is inherently selfish. These 70 year olds have grandchildren too, and they're smart enough to play the politics game so I am sure they understand the overwhelming science on this issue, yet they clearly just don't care. And this election makes clear that we can't rely on the voting base to be well informed.
It's a valid concern that one voter only has to worry about their decisions for the next five years, but the rest have to for the next sixty years. Yet we have no problem with prioritizing based on life expectancy when it comes to organ donor recipients, charging more for life insurance based on age, etc.
Further, voting is already inherently unfair and weighted based on where you live thanks to the electoral college and every state getting two EC votes automatically. Some states result in voters having four times the voting power of people in other states. That and all the people living in guaranteed blue (California) or red (Texas) states effectively have no vote in practice. The same is even more true of senate representation, with two senators for every state, regardless of population.
You look at something like marriage equality, and per Pew research, 71% of millenials approve yet only 38% of the silent generation do. Yet the issue has a serious chance of being reversed due to Trump's inevitable Supreme Court picks. And our generation will be stuck with the fallout of that (and every other social issue that's bound to come up in the future) for likely 40+ years.
Look, I'm aging too. I'll be old soon. What I'm saying will already affect me as well. But this is just a matter of basic fairness.
This administration is going to push us well over the edge on carbon emissions. Our grandchildren and beyond will pay dearly for the harm that's going to be done. Those responsible will be long gone by then. That is not fair.
> But as they say, democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding on what to have for dinner.
That's why USA is not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic.
> but the rest have to for the next sixty years.
If you delude yourself with the idea you know what's going to happen in the next 60 years, you overestimate your abilities in such a way it's not even funny.
> You look at something like marriage equality, and per Pew research, 71% of millenials approve yet only 38% of the silent generation do.
So?
> Yet the issue has a serious chance of being reversed due to Trump's inevitable Supreme Court picks.
Based on what? Trump's position is that the issue is settled.
> And our generation will be stuck with the fallout of that (and every other social issue that's bound to come up in the future) for likely 40+ years.
There are a lot of SC decisions that the right didn't like. There are a lot of SC decisions that the left didn't like. Some of them change, some of them don't. I don't see how anything here is new or has anything to do with anything - there always will be some decisions somebody won't like. Trump pick would make SC as balanced as it has ever been - 4 lefty judges, 4 righty judges, one swing vote (Kennedy). Simplifying, of course, but that's what it is.
Moreover, SC running ahead of public consensus is not usually a good idea. The continued abortion struggle is a proof - there obviously wasn't/isn't public consensus, and the issue is still a hot topic.
With gay marriage though, the issue is much closer to public consensus and I predict it will vanish from public discussion (except of course panic propaganda on par with "Republicans are going to recreate slavery!") very soon.
> Look, I'm aging too. I'll be old soon. What I'm saying will already affect me as well. But this is just a matter of basic fairness.
No it's not. Nothing you said has anything to do with "basic fairness".
> This administration is going to push us well over the edge on carbon emissions.
I have no idea what that sentence means. I suspect neither do you.
> Our grandchildren and beyond will pay dearly for the harm that's going to be done.
That's always true - whatever we do, our grandchildren and beyond will have to deal with it. That's kind of by definition.
> Those responsible will be long gone by then. That is not fair.
I agree. I'd like to stick around for the next 1000 or so years, just to see what happens. Unfortunately, so far nobody found a way how. Very unfair!
So maybe people that will be dead in five years shouldn't be deciding social issues for the next sixty.
The silent generation had their lifetime "where men were MEN, women stayed in the kitchen, and gays didn't exist!"
Now it's our turn to have a diverse society where people can be whoever they want to be.
> Based on what? Trump's position is that the issue is settled.
Is Trump going to nominate himself for the Supreme Court, then? It's not up to Trump how his nominations will rule on the issue. But based on endless cases as evidence (5-4 party line splits), a conservative court will reverse Obergefell v Hodges the second it gets the chance.
It's not 100% certain, but the odds are very good if any of Ginsberg, Breyer, or Kennedy are replaced. The odds go up dramatically for two, and I would bet my life savings on it happening within 5-10 years if all three were replaced by Trump's administration.
> There are a lot of SC decisions that the right didn't like.
Correct, because Kennedy was less socially conservative, we managed 5-4 in Obergefell. But on fiscal issues, Citizens united was 5-4, Hobby Lobby was 5-4, gutting the voting rights act was 5-4, etc.
You're deluding yourself if you think the USSC in its current state is anything but extremely hyper-partisan. And yes, that applies to both sides.
> Trump pick would make SC as balanced as it has ever been - 4 lefty judges, 4 righty judges, one swing vote (Kennedy)
Replacing Scalia won't change the dynamic in any way, that is correct. Clinton making that pick could have pushed it to the left, but I'm betting they would've magically confirmed Merrick Garland within the week had the democrats won the white house and senate.
> Moreover, SC running ahead of public consensus is not usually a good idea. The continued abortion struggle is a proof - there obviously wasn't/isn't public consensus, and the issue is still a hot topic.
Yeah, those darn activist judges in Loving v Virginia and Brown v Board of Education. We should always wait for popular opinion to catch up on what's right. /s
> With gay marriage though, the issue is much closer to public consensus and I predict it will vanish from public discussion
I sure hope you're right. But Trump voters made the gamble with my marriage, not theirs.
> No it's not. Nothing you said has anything to do with "basic fairness".
I'll respond with an equally compelling counter to your argument here -- "yeah huh, it does so!"
Anyway, like I said, my opinion means nothing here. There's a snowball's chance in hell of us moving from proportional voting power based on physical location to proportional voting power based on age. Consider it my opinion, and we'll agree to disagree.
> I have no idea what that sentence means. I suspect neither do you.
(And no, I'm not a climate scientist. But I trust them a lot more than I trust oil and gas companies trying to protect their profits. See: tobacco companies in the '60s.)
> So maybe people that will be dead in five years shouldn't be deciding social issues for the next sixty.
You say it as if you know for sure you won't be dead in five years. It's nice to be a prophet.
> The silent generation had their lifetime "where men were MEN, women stayed in the kitchen, and gays didn't exist!"
Sorry, it's a load of hateful baloney. That generation fought for real civil rights. This generation fights for right not to be served sushi because it's cultural appropriation, not to be subjected to a words of a slightly controversial speaker, because it's "unsafe", and needs coloring books and play-dough to cope with losing an election. That's the generation that seriously claims they feel physically unsafe when somebody challanges their beliefs to the point of being unable to function and needing to be sequestered in a specially designated space, or they will break down completely. Not that's not I am saying about them, that's what they say about themselves. And that's the people claiming to have superior role? Puh-lease. You wanted play-dough, you get play-dough.
> It's not 100% certain, but the odds are very good if any of Ginsberg, Breyer, or Kennedy are replaced.
Keep talking about disenfranchising your opponents, and 4 years of Trump become 8, and you get it for sure.
> Is Trump going to nominate himself for the Supreme Court, then?
Nope, but it is reasonable to think the will nominate somebody who thinks like him. Otherwise all talk about who he's going to nominate is pointless.
> You're deluding yourself if you think the USSC in its current state is anything but extremely hyper-partisan.
And by "extremely hyper-partisan" you mean "not always deciding how I like it."
> But Trump voters made the gamble with my marriage, not theirs.
Votes for Trump had literally nothing to do with gay marriage question. It wasn't an issue in the campaign, and Trump himself is on record saying it's settled. That's what his voters voted for. So really there's no gamble, there's no there there. It's done, it's ok to move on. Using this question in order to criticize Trump could lead to only one outcome - when someone other than Trump arises who thinks it's not settled, he'd look like someone discussing legitimate current issue of the day, not something that was decided and agreed on years ago. Do you really want to fight for that?
> I'll respond with an equally compelling counter to your argument here -- "yeah huh, it does so!"
Except you started with such argument. If you claim you proved Fermat theorem, it's on you to provide the proof. If you claim equal vote is unfair, it's on you to prove so. So far your proof was mostly whining about how old folks ruined everything. That's not a proof, it's just bellyaching.
Nice story. Except nobody knows where it is, what it means and how it works. It's basically a fairy tale. Nobody ever demonstrated any scientific proof of existence of it.
> It's a valid concern that one voter only has to worry about their decisions for the next five years, but the rest have to for the next sixty years.
Do you see the hidden assumption here? It is that people vote purely selfishly and don't care about anything that happens after they are dead. As neither of those is remotely true, your proposal makes no sense.
That's fine. My position isn't based on making sure my party wins. It obviously has a liberal slant just due to old people being more conservative for obvious reasons, but the real goal is fairness in "your vote is proportional to how long you have to suffer the consequences of it."
I didn't vote for Clinton either, because she's not a liberal. She's a center-right candidate who is further to the right than Obama was (also a center-right candidate.) She was also far worse at giving motivational speeches, and after she and the DNC threw Bernie under the bus, it's not at all surprising she did poorly with younger voters.
In a theoretical world, finding potential resources is always good. You have the option to extract from it, or ban extraction from it -- which is no worse than not finding it in the first place.
Put another way, shouldn't news of any new option be good?
It's interesting then that there's such negativity, or at least ambiguity, in this thread. Is it because we've grown more pessimistic at the irresponsibility of society?
The option to ban extraction is not on the table at all. Wells start pumping immediately after a discovery is made. The election of Trump is a dawning realization to many of us that our civilization is incapable of stopping it's acceleration as we head over the climate change cliff.
It's interesting, but it's not surprising. There's a hive-mind on HN when it comes to anything associated with oil. The most ludicrous, unscientific, repeatedly debunked theories about environmental damage from fracking are uncritically believed, conspiracy theories about "oil barons" and Mideast wars are the order of the day, and of course you can't go five minutes without someone happily reminding us all that soon God, er, global warming will punish us sinners.
Just now goverment is about to be thrown because (at least from my somewhat biased understanding) they insist that any extra income from climate taxes on fuel are distributed back to the population in the form of tax breaks or cheaper train tickets :-/
If there was a way to cut the burning of fossil fuels dramatically that didn't involve taxing it, or being too heavy handed dictating what to put on the markets, I'd be happy to see it put into action. In fact, I'd prefer it, because tax revenue from environmental damage gives government a perverse incentive to allow companies to continue with environmental damage.
Until then, the money coming in from taxation is going to be used somewhere, and it seems a shame to use it somewhere that doesn't benefit anyone.
There is a way: it's called the free market. We didn't tax horses to force the innovation of cars and airplanes. Taxation didn't lead to telephones and computers.
When someone develops cheap, plentiful, clean energy at scale, oil will be made redundant. The free market is all about innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.
Maybe you should check the environment of former socialist republics (e.g. Soviet Union), since you somehow believe that collectivist systems take better care of the commons.
Maybe you should check your cold war mindset whereby pointing out a limitation of the free market necessarily gets a response about the USSR. As though that were literally the only possible alternative.
To recap:
ori_b: How to disincentivize fossil fuel use? [a current policy goal]
briandear: The free market! All we need is magical energy tech that doesn't exist yet and makes oil obsolete overnight, haha.
me: The free market actually doesn't solve the externality problem.
Didn't downvote you but I for one am totally happy with taxes being used to help speed up this process; that is as long as it isn't just used as an excuse for increasing the general tax burden.
This is why I was happy last year when gas taxes were raised and the money fed back to cut taxes and help reduce ticket prices.
The free market is incapable of valuing the environment. How do you place a dollar amount on the survival of our species? Every gallon of petrol burned causes damage to the environment. How do you calculate the cost of that damage? How can the free market ever solve our problem if this very real cost is not reflected in the price of the product? Don't you think it's fishy that oil companies are now actually pushing for more taxes on fossil fuels? It's because they know that they'll get a bargain; the tax will always be lower than the value of the damage they're causing to our planet, and by the time everyone else realizes that it will be too late. They will be even more rich, and our species will be franticly scrambling to deal with the consequences of our inaction.
We've seen it time and time again; the free market is prone to the same short-sightedness as the rest of the human race. It will continue advancing in exactly the same way until it is either forced to change or eats itself whole, except instead of a depression we will face extinction.
The work of Coase and Pigou both imply that the free market is perfectly capable of "valuing the environment" - these things just don't adhere well to states in which identity politics make reasoning about these things in a price way off limits.
I freely admit for myself - it seems rather a cold and .. Vulcan way of looking at it, but what other choice is there?
It's humanity that is short-sighted ( because of time pressure in decision processes causing things like hyperbolic discounting )and free markets reflect that, as would any thinking other than purest central planning.
We're back to "no straight thing was ever constructed from the crooked timber of humanity." Trying to ... sawmill it straight has a pretty poor track record.
Meanwhile, the hydrocarbon industry sowed the wind by drinking the zero-coupon bond Kool-Aid and will reap the whirlwind.
> The work of Coase and Pigou both imply that the free market is perfectly capable of "valuing the environment" […] It's humanity that is short-sighted
I'm not sure there's anything more worthless than purely theorical econ, if you assume perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum all economic systems will end up at the same point and it doesn't really matter which one you pick.
> We're back to "no straight thing was ever constructed from the crooked timber of humanity." Trying to ... sawmill it straight has a pretty poor track record.
And yet that's the entire point of political and economic system, if you unmoor the system from the "crooked timber of humanity" it has no application.
Systems which use the noises in people's heads to cancel each other out do better. That's Smith's point abut his scorn for "the Man Of System" - nobody is that smart.
It's important to understand the limitations of such things.
Some of them definitely are. Like sellers of carbon credits, or multiple "green energy" projects relying solely or mainly on government (read: taxpayer financed) investment, or proponents of climate taxes, or even companies like Tesla who makes hundreds of millions per year selling "green car credits" to other car companies. There's a lot of money in the game by now, even if most regular folks don't get any of it.
Are they? Carbon credits are at least in principle meant to accomplish a reasonable goal. As for relying on taxpayer-financed investments, that's exactly what tax money is meant to be used for. I mean, damn it, Tesla is the golden standard of using government loans efficiently, for the betterment of society, and even paying them back in full ahead of schedule! And they get criticized for it. I guess some people don't care about reality if it doesn't fit into their ideologies... sigh
> Carbon credits are at least in principle meant to accomplish a reasonable goal.
The argument is not whether the goal is reasonable, but whether are money is play. With carbon credits, there certainly are, and a lot of it.
> As for relying on taxpayer-financed investments, that's exactly what tax money is meant to be used for.
Nope, it's exactly what tax money are not meant to be used for. Tax money should be used to protect the citizens, to provide for law enforcement, defense, common infrastructure, taking care of the poor and ill. High-risk venture investment is not what it should be used for. That's what private VCs are for. And if VCs wouldn't want to touch it with ten-foot pole, maybe there's a reason for that.
> Tesla is the golden standard of using government loans efficiently, for the betterment of society, and even paying them back in full ahead of schedule!
Exactly because they profited so much out of "green credits" mandate, effectively taxing owners of all other cars to their advantage. Getting hundreds of millions by government mandate is a pretty sweet deal, especially if their direct competitors have to pay it.
This whole line of reasoning is far fetched. "The world is ending, give us money", you're suggesting that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by green credit market participants? It's just twisting the obvious, that climate change comes from concerned scientists, to try to add some evil ulterior motive. All to shove reality into your preferred worldview that liberal masterminds are trying to ruin the world, or something.
> High-risk venture investment is not what it should be used for. That's what private VCs are for. And if VCs wouldn't want to touch it with ten-foot pole, maybe there's a reason for that.
VCs are glorified gamblers. I think you need to take a good look at how advanced science and technology has been done since there is science and technology; you'll quickly realize it always has direct or indirect government backing - because market itself doesn't exactly favour anything more long-term than your next quarterly report.
> effectively taxing owners of all other cars to their advantage
If that was true, I'd actually be pretty happy about it - about time someone made polluters pay for the externalities. But this isn't true, in fact it's government who decides that certain areas of technology (like green energy, green transportation) should be developed further, and offers loans and grants as a way of incentivizing companies to work in those areas.
So instead of gambling with the money from affluent people, given voluntarily, we should gamble with tax money, taken coercively from much poorer people, competing with budgets for welfare, hospitals, schools, etc. - and gamble with that. Brilliant.
> because market itself doesn't exactly favour anything more long-term than your next quarterly report.
It's bullcrap, easily disproven by existance of multiple companies with hundred-year histories. And existance of whole divisions in those companies doing long-term projects.
> If that was true,
What you mean "if"? That's a fact. Easily verifyable. Tesla sells credits to other auto-makers. It has been reported many times and widely known.
The world is on the verge of disastrous climate change. This fact is well established. Why exactly are we supposed to rejoice at the news of more fossil fuel reserves?
You believe in popular AGW theory. Not everyone does. Not everyone takes it as fact that global warming is what folks say it is. There's enough spin and inconsistency in the scientific community that not even they agree on it. Let's assume for sake of discussion that warming is happening. Okay. I'll do my best to live responsibly. Am I going to buy in to all the Chicken Little melodrama? Nope.
Also, I thinking there's enough good momentum towards use of alt energy resources, that we're going the right direction.
This is hacker news. Here, climate change is a conspiracy theory, automation will never destroy any jobs or require any change in how we live, and unregulated capitalism is the solution to everything. Oh, and we're pretty stoked about our new NRX, oh, sorry, alt-right president!
What, you thought this community was better? That smart people are smart?
Sorry - smart people are stupid too - their mistakes are just bigger. Who do you think designed the nazi war machine, idiots? Was Speer a dullard?
No. intelligent people believe just as much stupid crap as the next man. They choose to ignore their education in favour of emotion.
Yarr, down she goes. Creatures which dwell under rocks dislike the light.
There's enough spin and inconsistency in the scientific community that not even they agree on it.
The scientific consensus is that global warming is real. Climate change is happening now. The debate is about the details: how much warming there will be, how fast, and what the effects will be. This is a normal part of science, and how it's supposed to work. Regardless of the details, at this point, it is pretty clear by now that we are screwed even if we aren't quite sure how badly.
As far as I can tell, the only spin comes from idiot politicians invested in the status quo.
We have viable alternatives to running on oil and there are people actively pushing to switch the society to other energy sources. It can be done, it has to be done if we want our grandchildren to have a livable conditions on this planet.
The thing we need is for people to stop countering the change out of their short-term interest in lining their own pockets.
There are no viable alternatives to oil apart from coal and nuclear, sorry
Not until we have an order-of-magnitude breakthrough in battery tech or some new form of storage
Germany raised it's electricity price almost 3 times since it started it's riddiculous renewable energy bs and they still are only ~25% renewables (And they offshored their heavy, energy intensive industry that just packed up and moved to China, to happily pollute even more than before)
There you have it. This is a viable alternative that's safe, and green.
Germany did exactly the wrong thing IMO. They should've expanded their nuclear capacity instead of shutting off perfectly good plans and starting to pollute the world (proxying through China, as you say).
Oil is a finite resource, this does not mean we will suddenly use it all up. Instead the cost of extraction will continue to rise until alternatives displace oil. Getting ahead of that transistion has a lot of value just look at companies like Kodak who missed shifts like these.
The rejoicing one tends to hear around this place is from the apocalypse mongers, gleefully trading stories about how global warming will kill us all in exactly the same tones as fundamentalist Christians in the 1980s spinning lurid tales about the sinners being tortured in Hell. Seriously, the parallels are uncanny.
Care to elaborate about debunked theories? I'd like to see proof/refutation about those theories. The main problem is not necessarily how you extract it but how you use it. If you burn it you contribute to global warming. If you burn the forest which was present before the extraction you also contribute to global warming.
In a theoretical world, rational actors would never take the dominated option. We don't live in that world.
In our world, the one making the choice may not be the one adversely affected. There may be disagreement about the best action. There may be unavoidable risks.
Examples: thermonuclear war, global warming, predatory lending, biological weapons...
Consider a hypothetical doomsday device that could be developed in a garage. The "all options are a net good" principle is just not a very useful one in practice.
We've always been pessimistic about human nature. Advancing technology raises the stakes.
Too bad we have to burn all that carbon first and we can't just pump it right into the atmosphere. At least we get to inject toxic wastewater into the ground and cause some earthquakes in the process.
Consider that to get that 900 billion worth of oil we'd probably have spend 400 billion in extraction costs. Over all likely better to spend that on renewables instead.
Most people here are Muricans, they (you?) cannot easily and massively get rid of a more than century old culture based on individualism, short-term thinking, greediness, "bigger is greater" applied to every single aspect of life and society, and oil.
Yes, but on some issues, otherwise smart people hold amazingly ignorant opinions. I'm sure you can find examples no matter which side of the issue you're on.
20 billion barrels of oil sounds a lot until you realize that the world consumes around 35 billion barrels per year. All this fracking comes at a huge environmental cost and all this to keep hanging on to our fossil addiction for a few more quarters.
I know those people would be glad for the money, but damnit it was 80 Fahrenheit on Friday and it's nearly Thanksgiving. Whatever's going on with the weather, humanity doesn't need to be making it any worse.
The effects we're feeling in the South US are mostly from the La Nina[1], but there is actually something interesting happening with the Arctic ice this winter. It's still below zero up there, but we might end up with a northern channel in about 4 years if it stays this warm. It isn't just about the ice that has formed, but the speed that it's forming. It's significantly slower than recent years[2]. This was caused in part from storms[3], so now the rapidly warming temperatures can cascade in the next years with darker water and thinner ice. Also, the methane crater explosions in Sibera can't be helping...[4]
To put this in perspective, let's assume that there are indeed 75x10^9 barrels of oil. Fracking typically can only extract around 10% of the oil-in-place (the rest is too expensive to recover once the reservoir pressure drops, even at $100/barrel)[1].
The US consumes 19 million barrels a day [2], so (75000 barrels*0.1)/(19bpd)/(365 dpy) = 1 year. All that oil would be burnt in a single year if it was the only source!
[1] Consequently, the recovery factors for shale oil are
typically lower than they are for shale gas, ranging from 3 percent to 7 percent of the oil in-place with exceptional cases being as high as 10% or as low as 1 percent. http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/pdf/overvi...
I like that it's called the "Permian Basin". We're literally digging up the sequestered carbon from hundreds of millions of years ago and putting it back up into the atmosphere to rapidly recreate the climate of that period.
That period lasted millions of years. All the CO2 we are blasting into the atmosphere will be absorbed by the oceans in thousands (or at most ten thousands) of years.
(It's taking a while, because the surface layers of the oceans can only absorb so much, and mixing into the deeper layers takes time.)
Probably true, but the fact that we eat all those fish is a far bigger short term problem.
I heard somewhere (rumor alert) that jellyfish and other species we don't like to eat are taking over much of the oceans, since we ate most of the fish.
Open a small business harvesting jellyfish. It is already a growth market in Asia and will be a growth market for the next 50 years in many parts of the USA:
"Southern Fishermen Cash In On Asia's Taste For Jellyfish":
It's not just because of fishery collapse. The changing temperature and pH matters, too. Reefs bleaching and all that.
I wouldn't say it's a rumor. Just a possibility as reported by some researchers. Not a consensus, as far as I know, though there was a book about it summarizing the research.
The acidity of the surface layer increases right now. And that's a big problem.
The mixing I was talking about will take a few thousand years, and I am not sure there's enough air to make a dent in the whole ocean's depths' pH level.
It's named after the Permian Sea, the entire area was under water during that timeframe. I'm not a geologist though this is just what I've was told growing up in the area.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/11/18/the-midla...
Plus, we're at a stage where we really need to leave a lot of oil in the ground:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/07/much-wor...
In WWII the Allies deeply learned the benefits of having vast, safe oil resources in lands untouchable by the enemy. US policy after the war called for encouraging foreign development, especially by the US majors, in order to keep our reserves in tact for the next war.
For reference the US consumed 7 billion barrels in 2015[1] so this represents basically nearly 3 years of consumption by the US with no imports at all. And world consumption has been nearly flat for a while.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=33&t=6
That said, there is a lot of evidence and history that supports the notion that OPEC only managed to keep oil prices high by threatening member states with retaliation if they under cut the "standard" price. And at the same time, people who were in a position to undercut that price (Venezuela, Russia, Brazil) did so in order to get more foreign currency faster.
It is always a balance of incentives. The market clearly will buy oil at lower prices if given the opportunity.
So one could imagine an act of economic warfare where the oil and gas reserves were developed as quickly as possible and shipped to Europe at a steep discount to cut into the revenues Russia makes selling oil and gas. Thus putting a huge crimp in their economy which makes their military spending cut into their social programs more deeply causing internal unrest and dissatisfaction.
That certainly would not be in the best interests of the companies pulling the oil out of the ground, but it could be in the best interests of the US policy makers.
My original point was that the $900B number was specious, you cannot take the 'estimate of reserves in barrels' x 'the spot price of oil' and call it the 'value'. The quantity is material to the commodity price on the market and so moving it through the market will change the net value.
"The Midland Basin Wolfcamp Shale Is Not Worth $900 Billion - That's Not How Resource Economics Works"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/11/18/the-midla...
Edit: I really was being sarcastic. This is the current response towards Facebook and I was trying to demonstrate how silly it is.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
I feel like there's something more interesting going on here. Like, more to the point that there's this unstoppable reality that people are reading the stories they find attractive.
Whether the goal of the stories was to game a compensation system, by forming a click-bait content-farming advertisement ring, and whether it was a plan hatched by two-bit amateurs doesn't matter as much as the premise that many, many people are susceptible to preferring a channel that happily conforms to the ideas that seem to please them, without questioning why it always provides them with everything they've always agreed with.
Is the problem that someone out there is creating junk food popcorn stories that people smoke crack and read avidly? Or is the problem that people are smoking crack before they read the news?
Seems like it's an easier solution to hunt down those rotten unethical publishers. But after you get rid of the publishers, you still have this sprawling kingdom of crack addicts, so did anything really get fixed?
Like, certain people prefer to hear that we have this amazing trillion dollar oil field now, whether it's worth that much or not. So that's what gets published.
Meanwhile, the valuation of the huge, bigly oil field is a digression from the more pressing conversation about whether we should ever burn all that oil to begin with.
Like, yeah, wow. Lots of oil. Great. But uh, what about all the smog and that business with the greenhouse gases? Weren't we supposed to start using less oil?
But never mind all that! What gets clicks is the price tag! Run it!
True that the 900B estimate is nothing to do with actual monetary value of the deposit - it's just a size estimate expressed in terms most understandable by common person. Maybe it is misleading - though quantifying "a real lot of oil" to make it comprehensible is not an easy task, and writing "well, there's lots of oil but we have no idea if we can get to it and how much would that cost" is a bad headline. But the correction that 900B figure is just a sort of "car analogy" to estimate the size and not the actual worth is true. It does not mean original article is "fake news" - it's true news, just using one somewhat misleading illustration.
Heck, by this metric CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, NYT, WP all are fake news outlets. What are the real news then?
But of course, while the oil is running there are lots of jobs created, at least until OPEC decides they've had enough and drives the price of oil back down.
Since this is Texas, I'm pretty sure the local community won't worry about this stuff much (I grew up in Texas and have relatives who live just north of this field's extent). Hopefully the benefits will outweigh the costs for them -- it's not clear that this has been the case for North Dakota.
That same desert could house miles of solar panels and miles of wind farms. But, very few people are pushing that solution to the energy problem, even though it is now price-competitive with fossil fuels to do so in places like Texas, where both wind and sun are plentiful almost year round.
Shale oil is a very different process than traditional oil wells, and much riskier to water reservoir resources in the region.
As for the extra space for fracking, most states require returning the land back to how it was before after the few month process of fracking is done.
Thing is, in many places it rains, and the waste water doesn't evaporate, it just remains until a government body cleans it up or the pool membrane ruptures and it enters the water table - many smaller operators wind up after extraction, and leave their tailings for the EPA to deal with, and reincorporate and move on to the next parcel. Again, not just fracking - applies to a lot of stuff where waste is produced.
So, while in a perfect world fracking uses little land, in reality, it uses rather a bit - and is being heavily state subsidised both directly and indirectly.
All of that said, a silver lining might be that wellhead sites end up too polluted to be used for anything but solar farms.
There is an easy way to protect from after-effects: the government must mandate that a specific percentage of revenue be set aside in a trust or other impartial entity (government itself doesn't count, because government funds are always open to be tapped for other purposes). This money is at the end either used by the government to fund restoration if the operator goes belly-up, or refunded to the operator.
Also, until we get some good energy storage solutions, we are just going to run into the same problems of too much electricity during the middle of the day and not enough in the evening.
It also can depend a lot on height (very important for wind turbines)
The process is not as efficient as batteries (or just burning oil products found in the ground), but you get similar energy densities as the normal hydrocarbons. After all, the chemistry is the same.
I just wish we had functioning carbon tax or carbon emission markets. Then the government could just set the price or volume, and the market could figure out the most cost-efficient energy mix to hit the target.
The problem with solar is that solar does not provide on-demand electricity. Solar and batteries can, but that is much more expensive than using oil.
So yes, but the point is somewhat mute since both would indubitably be used in this case.
and Oklahoma, and probably more...
I'd guess that this would lead to instability and possibly war... though it could mean less US involvement in the area, for better or worse.
Cost efficiency.
But with frack companies hanging by their teeth it isn't clear that this will be done.
This is a solvable problem but market conditions and the people left in the industry my not support it very well. It's not exactly a hotbed of technological innovation.
Or some real jobs and money in these dirt poor areas.
> even more greenhouse gasses released into our atmosphere
Any working solution to that has to be global and reduce demand. Refusing to drill American oil mostly means more oil money to Saudis, Putin, Venezuela and other of the worst butchers and oppressors of the world.
The people building it come from out of town, the people who will be making money from the pipeline are its owners, and the people who will be picking up the bill if things go pear-shaped will be the people who live there.
If you have any doubts about that, check out how the Exxon Valdez spill was handled. The oil company makes the profits, and can find all sorts of ways to get out of paying for the damages.
But you fail to mention that we have an oppressive government gearing up in the US too. So perhaps it's best if they help us drain ours.
Are you saying the land owners don't get paid?
Besides, this is primarily about oil wells, not pipelines. I know having oil wells on your land can be very lucrative.
> If you have any doubts about that, check out how the Exxon Valdez spill was handled
That was a one of a kind, history changing event in the arctic ocean decades ago. It's hard to think it's typical of rural Texas in the 2020s.
"The rich bastards will always screw you" is a fine sentiment over a beer in a country bar, but not a great analysis to to base trillion dollar decisions on.
There are three that I can find, one is in east Texas, one is in Maverick County on the Rio Grande, the third and last one I could find is in El Paso. None of these are co-extensive with the find that borders San Angelo and Lubbock.
>No matter how good the profit in the near future might be
Absolutes won't further your goals. Excess capital is what funds companies like Tesla.
Yet everyone acts like it's a monstrous proposition when I state that voting power should be weighted based on age rather than location like it is today. Not that it matters, it's never going to change.
Some rise above it, but human nature is inherently selfish. These 70 year olds have grandchildren too, and they're smart enough to play the politics game so I am sure they understand the overwhelming science on this issue, yet they clearly just don't care. And this election makes clear that we can't rely on the voting base to be well informed.
It's a valid concern that one voter only has to worry about their decisions for the next five years, but the rest have to for the next sixty years. Yet we have no problem with prioritizing based on life expectancy when it comes to organ donor recipients, charging more for life insurance based on age, etc.
Further, voting is already inherently unfair and weighted based on where you live thanks to the electoral college and every state getting two EC votes automatically. Some states result in voters having four times the voting power of people in other states. That and all the people living in guaranteed blue (California) or red (Texas) states effectively have no vote in practice. The same is even more true of senate representation, with two senators for every state, regardless of population.
You look at something like marriage equality, and per Pew research, 71% of millenials approve yet only 38% of the silent generation do. Yet the issue has a serious chance of being reversed due to Trump's inevitable Supreme Court picks. And our generation will be stuck with the fallout of that (and every other social issue that's bound to come up in the future) for likely 40+ years.
Look, I'm aging too. I'll be old soon. What I'm saying will already affect me as well. But this is just a matter of basic fairness.
This administration is going to push us well over the edge on carbon emissions. Our grandchildren and beyond will pay dearly for the harm that's going to be done. Those responsible will be long gone by then. That is not fair.
That's why USA is not a democracy, it's a constitutional republic.
> but the rest have to for the next sixty years.
If you delude yourself with the idea you know what's going to happen in the next 60 years, you overestimate your abilities in such a way it's not even funny.
> You look at something like marriage equality, and per Pew research, 71% of millenials approve yet only 38% of the silent generation do.
So?
> Yet the issue has a serious chance of being reversed due to Trump's inevitable Supreme Court picks.
Based on what? Trump's position is that the issue is settled.
> And our generation will be stuck with the fallout of that (and every other social issue that's bound to come up in the future) for likely 40+ years.
There are a lot of SC decisions that the right didn't like. There are a lot of SC decisions that the left didn't like. Some of them change, some of them don't. I don't see how anything here is new or has anything to do with anything - there always will be some decisions somebody won't like. Trump pick would make SC as balanced as it has ever been - 4 lefty judges, 4 righty judges, one swing vote (Kennedy). Simplifying, of course, but that's what it is.
Moreover, SC running ahead of public consensus is not usually a good idea. The continued abortion struggle is a proof - there obviously wasn't/isn't public consensus, and the issue is still a hot topic.
With gay marriage though, the issue is much closer to public consensus and I predict it will vanish from public discussion (except of course panic propaganda on par with "Republicans are going to recreate slavery!") very soon.
> Look, I'm aging too. I'll be old soon. What I'm saying will already affect me as well. But this is just a matter of basic fairness.
No it's not. Nothing you said has anything to do with "basic fairness".
> This administration is going to push us well over the edge on carbon emissions.
I have no idea what that sentence means. I suspect neither do you.
> Our grandchildren and beyond will pay dearly for the harm that's going to be done.
That's always true - whatever we do, our grandchildren and beyond will have to deal with it. That's kind of by definition.
> Those responsible will be long gone by then. That is not fair.
I agree. I'd like to stick around for the next 1000 or so years, just to see what happens. Unfortunately, so far nobody found a way how. Very unfair!
So maybe people that will be dead in five years shouldn't be deciding social issues for the next sixty.
The silent generation had their lifetime "where men were MEN, women stayed in the kitchen, and gays didn't exist!"
Now it's our turn to have a diverse society where people can be whoever they want to be.
> Based on what? Trump's position is that the issue is settled.
Is Trump going to nominate himself for the Supreme Court, then? It's not up to Trump how his nominations will rule on the issue. But based on endless cases as evidence (5-4 party line splits), a conservative court will reverse Obergefell v Hodges the second it gets the chance.
It's not 100% certain, but the odds are very good if any of Ginsberg, Breyer, or Kennedy are replaced. The odds go up dramatically for two, and I would bet my life savings on it happening within 5-10 years if all three were replaced by Trump's administration.
> There are a lot of SC decisions that the right didn't like.
Correct, because Kennedy was less socially conservative, we managed 5-4 in Obergefell. But on fiscal issues, Citizens united was 5-4, Hobby Lobby was 5-4, gutting the voting rights act was 5-4, etc.
You're deluding yourself if you think the USSC in its current state is anything but extremely hyper-partisan. And yes, that applies to both sides.
> Trump pick would make SC as balanced as it has ever been - 4 lefty judges, 4 righty judges, one swing vote (Kennedy)
Replacing Scalia won't change the dynamic in any way, that is correct. Clinton making that pick could have pushed it to the left, but I'm betting they would've magically confirmed Merrick Garland within the week had the democrats won the white house and senate.
> Moreover, SC running ahead of public consensus is not usually a good idea. The continued abortion struggle is a proof - there obviously wasn't/isn't public consensus, and the issue is still a hot topic.
Yeah, those darn activist judges in Loving v Virginia and Brown v Board of Education. We should always wait for popular opinion to catch up on what's right. /s
> With gay marriage though, the issue is much closer to public consensus and I predict it will vanish from public discussion
I sure hope you're right. But Trump voters made the gamble with my marriage, not theirs.
> No it's not. Nothing you said has anything to do with "basic fairness".
I'll respond with an equally compelling counter to your argument here -- "yeah huh, it does so!"
Anyway, like I said, my opinion means nothing here. There's a snowball's chance in hell of us moving from proportional voting power based on physical location to proportional voting power based on age. Consider it my opinion, and we'll agree to disagree.
> I have no idea what that sentence means. I suspect neither do you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_(climatology)
(And no, I'm not a climate scientist. But I trust them a lot more than I trust oil and gas companies trying to protect their profits. See: tobacco companies in the '60s.)
You say it as if you know for sure you won't be dead in five years. It's nice to be a prophet.
> The silent generation had their lifetime "where men were MEN, women stayed in the kitchen, and gays didn't exist!"
Sorry, it's a load of hateful baloney. That generation fought for real civil rights. This generation fights for right not to be served sushi because it's cultural appropriation, not to be subjected to a words of a slightly controversial speaker, because it's "unsafe", and needs coloring books and play-dough to cope with losing an election. That's the generation that seriously claims they feel physically unsafe when somebody challanges their beliefs to the point of being unable to function and needing to be sequestered in a specially designated space, or they will break down completely. Not that's not I am saying about them, that's what they say about themselves. And that's the people claiming to have superior role? Puh-lease. You wanted play-dough, you get play-dough.
> It's not 100% certain, but the odds are very good if any of Ginsberg, Breyer, or Kennedy are replaced.
Keep talking about disenfranchising your opponents, and 4 years of Trump become 8, and you get it for sure.
> Is Trump going to nominate himself for the Supreme Court, then?
Nope, but it is reasonable to think the will nominate somebody who thinks like him. Otherwise all talk about who he's going to nominate is pointless.
> You're deluding yourself if you think the USSC in its current state is anything but extremely hyper-partisan.
And by "extremely hyper-partisan" you mean "not always deciding how I like it."
> But Trump voters made the gamble with my marriage, not theirs.
Votes for Trump had literally nothing to do with gay marriage question. It wasn't an issue in the campaign, and Trump himself is on record saying it's settled. That's what his voters voted for. So really there's no gamble, there's no there there. It's done, it's ok to move on. Using this question in order to criticize Trump could lead to only one outcome - when someone other than Trump arises who thinks it's not settled, he'd look like someone discussing legitimate current issue of the day, not something that was decided and agreed on years ago. Do you really want to fight for that?
> I'll respond with an equally compelling counter to your argument here -- "yeah huh, it does so!"
Except you started with such argument. If you claim you proved Fermat theorem, it's on you to provide the proof. If you claim equal vote is unfair, it's on you to prove so. So far your proof was mostly whining about how old folks ruined everything. That's not a proof, it's just bellyaching.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_(climatology)
Nice story. Except nobody knows where it is, what it means and how it works. It's basically a fairy tale. Nobody ever demonstrated any scientific proof of existence of it.
Do you see the hidden assumption here? It is that people vote purely selfishly and don't care about anything that happens after they are dead. As neither of those is remotely true, your proposal makes no sense.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...
I didn't vote for Clinton either, because she's not a liberal. She's a center-right candidate who is further to the right than Obama was (also a center-right candidate.) She was also far worse at giving motivational speeches, and after she and the DNC threw Bernie under the bus, it's not at all surprising she did poorly with younger voters.
Put another way, shouldn't news of any new option be good?
It's interesting then that there's such negativity, or at least ambiguity, in this thread. Is it because we've grown more pessimistic at the irresponsibility of society?
I am wondering if anyone will mention "peak oil" here too :)
Just now goverment is about to be thrown because (at least from my somewhat biased understanding) they insist that any extra income from climate taxes on fuel are distributed back to the population in the form of tax breaks or cheaper train tickets :-/
Until then, the money coming in from taxation is going to be used somewhere, and it seems a shame to use it somewhere that doesn't benefit anyone.
When someone develops cheap, plentiful, clean energy at scale, oil will be made redundant. The free market is all about innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.
Maybe you should check your cold war mindset whereby pointing out a limitation of the free market necessarily gets a response about the USSR. As though that were literally the only possible alternative.
To recap:
ori_b: How to disincentivize fossil fuel use? [a current policy goal]
briandear: The free market! All we need is magical energy tech that doesn't exist yet and makes oil obsolete overnight, haha.
me: The free market actually doesn't solve the externality problem.
you: The USSR wasn't perfect either!
This is why I was happy last year when gas taxes were raised and the money fed back to cut taxes and help reduce ticket prices.
We've seen it time and time again; the free market is prone to the same short-sightedness as the rest of the human race. It will continue advancing in exactly the same way until it is either forced to change or eats itself whole, except instead of a depression we will face extinction.
I freely admit for myself - it seems rather a cold and .. Vulcan way of looking at it, but what other choice is there?
It's humanity that is short-sighted ( because of time pressure in decision processes causing things like hyperbolic discounting )and free markets reflect that, as would any thinking other than purest central planning.
We're back to "no straight thing was ever constructed from the crooked timber of humanity." Trying to ... sawmill it straight has a pretty poor track record.
Meanwhile, the hydrocarbon industry sowed the wind by drinking the zero-coupon bond Kool-Aid and will reap the whirlwind.
I'm not sure there's anything more worthless than purely theorical econ, if you assume perfectly spherical cows in a vacuum all economic systems will end up at the same point and it doesn't really matter which one you pick.
> We're back to "no straight thing was ever constructed from the crooked timber of humanity." Trying to ... sawmill it straight has a pretty poor track record.
And yet that's the entire point of political and economic system, if you unmoor the system from the "crooked timber of humanity" it has no application.
It's important to understand the limitations of such things.
The free market cares nothing about externalities unless it's forced to.
> When someone develops cheap, plentiful, clean energy at scale, oil will be made redundant.
Case in point. And you're ignoring oil companies fighting tooth and nail to avoid that situation.
> The free market is all about innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.
The free market is about making money. An excellent to do that is to suppress innovation so that your product remains relevant.
The argument is not whether the goal is reasonable, but whether are money is play. With carbon credits, there certainly are, and a lot of it.
> As for relying on taxpayer-financed investments, that's exactly what tax money is meant to be used for.
Nope, it's exactly what tax money are not meant to be used for. Tax money should be used to protect the citizens, to provide for law enforcement, defense, common infrastructure, taking care of the poor and ill. High-risk venture investment is not what it should be used for. That's what private VCs are for. And if VCs wouldn't want to touch it with ten-foot pole, maybe there's a reason for that.
> Tesla is the golden standard of using government loans efficiently, for the betterment of society, and even paying them back in full ahead of schedule!
Exactly because they profited so much out of "green credits" mandate, effectively taxing owners of all other cars to their advantage. Getting hundreds of millions by government mandate is a pretty sweet deal, especially if their direct competitors have to pay it.
VCs are glorified gamblers. I think you need to take a good look at how advanced science and technology has been done since there is science and technology; you'll quickly realize it always has direct or indirect government backing - because market itself doesn't exactly favour anything more long-term than your next quarterly report.
> effectively taxing owners of all other cars to their advantage
If that was true, I'd actually be pretty happy about it - about time someone made polluters pay for the externalities. But this isn't true, in fact it's government who decides that certain areas of technology (like green energy, green transportation) should be developed further, and offers loans and grants as a way of incentivizing companies to work in those areas.
So instead of gambling with the money from affluent people, given voluntarily, we should gamble with tax money, taken coercively from much poorer people, competing with budgets for welfare, hospitals, schools, etc. - and gamble with that. Brilliant.
> because market itself doesn't exactly favour anything more long-term than your next quarterly report.
It's bullcrap, easily disproven by existance of multiple companies with hundred-year histories. And existance of whole divisions in those companies doing long-term projects.
> If that was true,
What you mean "if"? That's a fact. Easily verifyable. Tesla sells credits to other auto-makers. It has been reported many times and widely known.
Also, I thinking there's enough good momentum towards use of alt energy resources, that we're going the right direction.
What, you thought this community was better? That smart people are smart?
Sorry - smart people are stupid too - their mistakes are just bigger. Who do you think designed the nazi war machine, idiots? Was Speer a dullard?
No. intelligent people believe just as much stupid crap as the next man. They choose to ignore their education in favour of emotion.
Yarr, down she goes. Creatures which dwell under rocks dislike the light.
The scientific consensus is that global warming is real. Climate change is happening now. The debate is about the details: how much warming there will be, how fast, and what the effects will be. This is a normal part of science, and how it's supposed to work. Regardless of the details, at this point, it is pretty clear by now that we are screwed even if we aren't quite sure how badly.
As far as I can tell, the only spin comes from idiot politicians invested in the status quo.
The thing we need is for people to stop countering the change out of their short-term interest in lining their own pockets.
Not until we have an order-of-magnitude breakthrough in battery tech or some new form of storage
Germany raised it's electricity price almost 3 times since it started it's riddiculous renewable energy bs and they still are only ~25% renewables (And they offshored their heavy, energy intensive industry that just packed up and moved to China, to happily pollute even more than before)
There you have it. This is a viable alternative that's safe, and green.
Germany did exactly the wrong thing IMO. They should've expanded their nuclear capacity instead of shutting off perfectly good plans and starting to pollute the world (proxying through China, as you say).
In our world, the one making the choice may not be the one adversely affected. There may be disagreement about the best action. There may be unavoidable risks.
Examples: thermonuclear war, global warming, predatory lending, biological weapons...
Consider a hypothetical doomsday device that could be developed in a garage. The "all options are a net good" principle is just not a very useful one in practice.
We've always been pessimistic about human nature. Advancing technology raises the stakes.
[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/us/la-nina-arrives/
[2]http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2016/11/Figure2a.png
[3]https://robertscribbler.com/2016/11/18/arctic-storms-sparked...
[4]http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-exploding-permafrost-...
"we might end up with a northern channel in about 4 years if it stays this warm."
A "northern channel"? Do you mean a wider "Northwest Passage" from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans?
The US consumes 19 million barrels a day [2], so (75000 barrels*0.1)/(19bpd)/(365 dpy) = 1 year. All that oil would be burnt in a single year if it was the only source!
[1] Consequently, the recovery factors for shale oil are typically lower than they are for shale gas, ranging from 3 percent to 7 percent of the oil in-place with exceptional cases being as high as 10% or as low as 1 percent. http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/pdf/overvi...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=33&t=6
That period lasted millions of years. All the CO2 we are blasting into the atmosphere will be absorbed by the oceans in thousands (or at most ten thousands) of years.
(It's taking a while, because the surface layers of the oceans can only absorb so much, and mixing into the deeper layers takes time.)
I heard somewhere (rumor alert) that jellyfish and other species we don't like to eat are taking over much of the oceans, since we ate most of the fish.
"Southern Fishermen Cash In On Asia's Taste For Jellyfish":
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/01/28/267836803/sou...
"Jelly Balls Harvested by Boone Seafood Darien Georgia":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laArO6Yk-W0
I wouldn't say it's a rumor. Just a possibility as reported by some researchers. Not a consensus, as far as I know, though there was a book about it summarizing the research.
The mixing I was talking about will take a few thousand years, and I am not sure there's enough air to make a dent in the whole ocean's depths' pH level.