To put this in perspective, the population of Western Australia is about 2.6 million people. Most of those -- around 2 million -- live in Perth. Around $33k spent for every many, woman and child in the state.
A lot of that $88 billion (Gorgon and Wheatstone) was spent on local labour and supplies. And Gorgon was one capital project. At the height of the boom, there were hundreds of billions of dollars of capital projects underway simultaneously across Australia.
When I was last in SF a few months ago it reminded me of Perth at the height of the boom.
I hadn't thought about it until now, but Canada and Australia are very similar in several respects. They both have vast natural resources, and the population of both is found mostly in small regions.
In Australia it's mostly along some of the coast. In Canada it's mostly in a small strip just to the north of the USA.
Contrast to Europe. Lots of population everywhere. Contrast to the USA. The eastern third of the country is quite developed, as is a good part of California.
Just ignore Portland, Seattle and the entirety of NorCal, along with Denver/Boulder, and a bunch of other large cities in what some call the "flyover" parts of the US.
Excepting the coast, the western half of the USA is desert and mountains. There are scattered cities (Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix/Tuscon, Las Vegas, Boise, El Paso, Spokane), but most of the territory is relatively undeveloped and sparsely populated. (This is a good thing in my opinion. Covering every bit of land with city is a miserable societal goal. So is strip mining all of the land for fossil fuels and minerals, or turning it all to pasture.)
Even saying something like "California has a lot of people" can mislead you if you look at a map of the state. I live in Michigan and fly into Silicon Valley about twice a year; when I depart Michigan the entire state I fly over shows signs of human population, as everything is at least a farm [1]. In Silicon Valley, most of those mountains you can see on the horizon have nothing (visible from a plane) on the other side of them. Even most of California is empty mountain.
[1]: I have to qualify it with "the parts I fly over" because obviously I'm flying over the southern part of the state. Head north and you start getting vast tracks of wilderness, and the upper peninsula is effectively not populated. There's just a few beads of "civilization" tied together by some fairly long roads, which are themselves most of the rest of the "civilization", and then it's square mile after square mile of wilderness.
Texas is 695,662 km^2. That's larger than the combined area of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Great Britain (682,034 km^2), which have a combined population of more than 174 million people.
Even regarding Texas, about 16 million of those 27 million live in just 4 metro areas (Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio). Most of the the development, large metros included, is in the eastern half which is a fair bit less arid. Texas has 8 counties that make the top 50 least populous counties by density (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_statistics_of_the_Unite...).
It fits a pattern that also fits Australia and Canada... people don't want to live as much where it is extremely dry, or extremely hot / cold.
I haven't been to SF but it certainly sounds familiar.
Perth circa 2011/2012 was quite the boom town.
Of my friends who graduated in 2012/2013 and found jobs in O&G/Mining, most of them have since moved interstate/internationally and switched from resources to different industries or gone back to study after the boom receded. But for a while there engineering graduates were going straight into 120k salaries doing fly-in-fly-out work on mine sites.
Take natural gas (mostly methane) out of the ground. Cool it until it turns into a liquid (aka LNG) and takes less than 2% of the volume of the gas. Put it into ships. Sail ships to countries like Japan. Turn liquid back into gas and use it for e.g. power generation.
somewhat. LNG is sold on the basis of long-term supply contract. It's quite possible that LNG exported from Western Australia could make its way back to Sydney, Melbourne, other places if there is no pipeline infrastructure in place. the LNG import facilities compete on price, and in this example, Chevron would sell it to the highest bidder.
No one wants "stranded" gas, but it would be up to the Government of Australia to set up the pipeline to its major cities. I'm sure such a pipeline exists, but given the quantity of gas available, Australia may not be able to use it all.
Graphs are one thing, details about actual ongoing construction are something else. The North America graph in the article looks like a classic startup "hockey stick". And I've been at too many startups and seen too many hockey sticks to take them seriously. Details matter.
The two projects I linked to were delayed by many years. So the fact that there is substantial construction at both sites is a big deal. The fact that Cheniere is actually exporting LNG right now is an even bigger deal.
Smart move because there is not economic incentive for most "green energy" projects. Apologies to my liberal friends, but until you go full-Marxist in the first world countries, market-cost will always win. Game on!
Until we correctly account for negative externalities and stop giving certain incumbent energy industries a free ride (or worse, rebates), market cost won't reflect real cost, and economic incentives end up really being political incentives.
Aren't the incentives in place to encourage exploration and improve supplies and supply stability? I suppose that you're correct, to some degree. However, in the end, the equation is pretty simple when (cost of production + profit) > (the cost of an equivalent product, already in the market) then people will engage in that particular commerce. It's no more complicated than that.
Cost of production includes cost of locating and developing resources, so incentives that offset the cost of these allow for equivalent profit at a lower price.
The real point though is that the negative externalities are not included in the cost of production, because we as a society do not attribute their cost to the company that causes them.
The simplistic example is the company that pollutes the local water and the overall health of people in the community goes down. Even without major sicknesses and death, if it causes an average of an extra sick day per year for the local people, that's a major impact on the entire region[1].
But then what if we look at hard a little more removed? What if the river pollution affects other industries more directly? For example,if there's a ranch bordering the river, what if it makes the cattle sick, even just sicker than normal? What if it affects Salmon spawning downstream? These are all costs borne by others, so are not accounted for in the cost of the product the original company produces, but we all pay for it in litttle or big ways.
What if it just affects a species negatively without an industry behind it? If it's causing the extinction of some fish or frog species, what is the cost of that? You could say it negatively affects even human being in some small way to cause an extinction, but I don't know how to quantify the cost.
Originally we didn't account negative externalities because we didn't know it mattered. In the few cases where it was obvious we used the courts to deal with it. Now we're learning (or have learned) that things are interconnected much more than we believed, but we're stuck with a bunch of industries that are used to not paying for this, and a public that's used to the current costs of goods and services, and it's hard to change that. But hard to change doesn't mean it's economically sound.
Based on the inputs of time and initial biomass, yes, roughly.
Burning petroleum or coal is much more like burning diamonds than wood, economically and geologically. And if you look at the history of how we got here, especially the law and economics, the scientific basis for those assumptions was tremendously flawed.
You know what? The linked paper's assertion of 89 metric tonnes of plant matter = 1 gallon gasoline today? That's a thing. Sure. Calling the overall use of fuels reckless? Also a thing. It's fine, really.
Assigning gas a $20,000,000/gallon value based on crude extrapolations of what biomass it would take to replace gas, without doing hardcore economic modelling on the price elasticity of demand, the availability of substitutes, and explaining the assumptions you've made to determine what's the right discount rate to use on the future value of the stored resource – and, indeed, of the value of the environment and humanity's future in general?
That's little better than pulling the numbers out of your ass. The world isn't linear enough to just do things like that.
The price elasticity argument is a red herring. The availability of substitutes is something to consider, though to a large extent for mobile transportation fuels those simply do not exist. There are some remote possibilities that we might be able to come up with something. Electrical generation looks slightly more favourable, and would replace much coal use. The 15% or so of coal used in coking of iron for steel production, somewhat less so, though that's potentially fungible.
There's a reason I'm suggesting order-of-magnitude ranges for pricing errors rather than specific dollar amounts to any level of precision, and I'm willing to suggest a 3-8 OOM range (1,000 to 100,000,000) range based on available data.
A nonrenewable resource, economically, is one whose market price fails to account for the time costs of natural formation, such that rates of consumption exceed rates of restoration.
The relevant number from Dukes' paper, by the way, isn't strictly the biomass required, but the accumulation period of that biomass: roughly 5 million years of ancient accumulation per present year of usage (as of 1997). Another source, Reinventing Fire (Amory Lovins et al) gives the value of 17 million times higher a usage than accumulation rate.
Either way, this represents an off-books financing either in the form of debt (as many represent it) or a draw-down of capital stock or savings (as I prefer to view it), which present economic theory fails to account for.
It needn't do this, and I've been exploring how and why the present circumstance and economic mythology (to use economist Thorstein Veblen's term) emerged.
Adam Smith defines costs as the total factors of input, which would include natural factors and their factors, including formation time. David Ricardo presumed land rents (from which natural resource rents theory emerged) were based on "the original and indestructible qualities of the soil", two false premises. Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall, and Menger discussed theories of cost far more comprehensive than the minimalistic and incomplete marginal theories now dominant (and causing numerous problems throughout microeconomics). The formative papers on natural resource and exhaustive resource pricing (Gray, 1914, Hotelling, 1931) fail to cite any geological references.
At the same time that this theory (or mythology) was forming and extractive fossil-fuel industries were forming, the understanding of geological scales and processes was itself undergoing a phenomenal revolution. As of Smith's time, understanding of the age of the Earth ranged from Ussher's ~6,000 years to ... "unknowably long" (Hutton), with estimates developing over the course of the 19th century of from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, though Lord Kelvin and other estimates ranging in the 20-40 million year range, based on understandings of thermodynamics ... and an ignorance of radioactivity. It was in this period that the legal models of property over mineral resources were established, largely Rule of Capture, with significant jurisprudence in 1804 (Post v. Priestly), the 1880s (oil & gas, W. Va. and Penn.), and 1904 (Texas). That law saw modifications in the 1930s due to advances in geological structural but not temporal understanding, and still remains largely in effect today in Texas and elsewhere (Daintith, several publications).
Chasing value manages to confound the fact that cost, price, and value are in fact three separate properties, though related. I call into question the environmental economic practice of trying to assign "use value" to various environmental factors without also taking into account the creation costs, net of environmental factors of production. I'm still thinking through full implications of this: entropy increases, so there's a net loss throughout the system, but there are more...
> We found ourselves on an over-capacity lifeboat but with an immense supplies cache. We've mistaken that supplies cache with the capacity to sustain ourselves indefinitely, a story which I suspect will end poorly.
Well put. This is why I get excited about SpaceX news. It, and other commercial space ventures, seem like the very beginnings of a formation of a plan to shuttle people to the other lifeboats we see around us. It doesn't actually solve the problem, but often it's easier to make better decisions the second time around...
> I'm quite aware that this is not orthodox economic thinking.
I wouldn't say it's entirely unorthodox economic thinking, just unorthodox practice. I would hazard most economists understand this, and likely agree to a greater or lesser degree, but sit somewhere around "believe it will self correct", "don't know how to change it" and "don't think it's a problem" on what to do about it depending on ideology.
SpaceX is interesting and hugely impressive -- I'd thought the prospects of flying a stage back under rocket power were nil and am openly eating my hat given Musk's accomplishments here.
That said, I'll maintain that outer space is, net net, a sink, not a source, and that there is no Earth2 within reach. At best we've a handful of solid bodies, most of which are moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and possibly some interesting mineral resources.
The fundamental problem we've got to tackle is one of understanding the concept of, assessing the magnituded of, and living within, limits. I don't see much sign of that having happened.
As for the economics, there are a number of places at which I depart sharply with orthodoxy, and I'm trying to assess just what those are. There are a few economists from whom I find some agreement and inspiration, though that's only a few, and going through and assessing theory is time consuming.
You're right to disconnect the cost, price, and value of a resource, but you seem to ignore that while computing the results you arrive at, and get nonsense contaminating what would otherwise be a good point.
As long as we're pretending to talk economics of any sort, orthodox or otherwise, the only cost that matters is the opportunity cost. All those millions of years replacing the oil in the ground? There's no opportunity cost to that. No one gave up any second-best alternative. That was just the ecosystem doing it's thing. And, it's a sunk cost, to boot. It is fact now. There is nothing to do about it.
So the only questions that matter here are what is the best possible alternative that we could possibly imagine for the future which we give up by extracting this gallon of gasoline and how should we compare that to 2017 dollars (how to discount the future, or even whether to do so).
If you think we can achieve output with same value as humanity currently regards 10 million bushels of corn by leaving just 1 gallon of gasoline's worth of petroleum in the ground, I'd like to hear why and how, because that's an extraordinary claim, and if they were actually real we could pay for a lot of alternative energy sources with these fantastical savings.
On the opportunity cost argument, consider a few alternative scenarios. How would you account for utilisation of a resource in the following circumstances:
1. You are in an office, with an office-supply cabinet. Your costs of accessing new supplies are the time it takes you to walk to the cabinet and obtain them. At some point, those supplies must be re-ordered. What is the property accounting mechanism for those supplies?
2. You've come into an inheritance. It represents the accumulated earnings of several lifetimes of your benefactors. You are limited to withdrawing a maximum amount of money in a given visit, and each visit requires cross-town travel and cab fare. How do you account for the depletion of this fund? Do you include your own time costs? The cab fare? An accounting for the depletion of the fund itself? An accounting of the costs of restoring withdrawn funds?
How does this change if your own present earning potential is only a very small fraction of the current fund? If the fund represents, say, the equivalent if 5 million ancestors' lifetime earnings?
3. You and 63 others are in a lifeboat, floating adrift, a year from the nearest opportunity for rescue. There is food and water aboard the lifeboat, but only sufficient to keep a maximum of 16 alive for that period. How do you account for the usage and decide on allocation of those supplies?
I'm well aware of opportunity costs, and of sunk costs.
For the former, I'm fairly convinced that the opportunities are not fully enumerated in current accounting, and that the economic, financial, and legal doctrines as I've described briefly above are based on world-models strongly at odds with the actual world-state.
There are a number of dimensions of this, and I'm not convinced I've explored all of them, but in the specific case of fossil fuels, a particular problem is that there is no accounting for the depletion of the resource itself. At a time when present rates of consumption accounted for a millionth or less the total resource (NB: not "proved reserves" or "economic reserves"), as was documented by several authors of coal in the 1880s, that might have been excusable. Funny thing is that exponential rates of increase have ... increased, and even in the case of the most abundant fossil resource (coal), that millionfold supply-to-present-consumption relationship has fallen to a factor of perhaps 100x. In other mineral resources we're looking at far smaller numbers (I've referenced a few such lists at https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius).
The problem with economic accounting such as you suggest -- best possible alternatives, future value, current prices, real currency -- is that it seems to me the accounting fails on multiple premises. Hotelling, incidentally, proposes just this in his 1931 paper, and it's one of several places in which I feel his analysis fails.
H.L. Gray, "Rent Under the Assumption of Exhaustibility" (1914) describes Ricardo's conclusions:
1. Price should increase over time.
2. Spot price is set by the highest cost-of-extraction mine.
3. Owners with lower costs earn a differential rent.
The 2nd and 3rd conclusions match observed experiences in oil especially -- a resource with exceptionally good pricing history, dating ...
"Externalities" cannot be deposited into a bank account and used to meet payroll and expenses. Throwing around high-minded economic-speak forward the argument for nor against this project. It's just a red herring, IMHO
The distinctly faint praise of "better than coal" does not seem to justify the term "green energy", I've certainly not heard anyone describe it thus before.
That was just one result on Google, you will find plenty more. Using Natural Gas is the #1 reason CO2 emissions have dropped in the US (and other countries).
Until recently, gas was just flared at oilrigs. It was waste not worth shipping. I remember flying past Persian gulf and looking down at sea been light by gas flares. Now the gas is put in use, it is still burned into co2. But now it creates electricity and reduces use of oil and coal.
So if LNG terminal reduces flaring, it's "green energy" project. But if it is to increase fracking, it's just fossil fuels project.
Indeed. To my mind, we really shouldn't start on fracking until flaring has been reduced to near-zero levels. It's wasteful and we can't afford the CO2 emissions.
Companies and governments do not want to flare gas. That's money just disappearing. To use this gas, however, you need to have the infrastructure set up to take the gas - you need fertilizer plants, power plants, etc that can use the gas as power. In the Middle East, these are not always possible in remote areas, so they flare it.
Natural gas is green energy because it's reducing dirty coal power plants. LNG terminals have nothing to do with fracking. LNG terminals are just an export facility.
Really? There are people like this on HN? You think these companies are spending billions to extract these resources them hording them in their vaults? No. They're help all of us buy the things we need, including the device you used to type your nonsense.
Australian here. In Norway, oil wealth on government land was turned into arguably the highest standard of living in the world. In Australia, it went mostly into the profits of companies headquartered overseas and the government negotiated with them so badly and/or corruptly that it's managing to run a budget deficit.
Of course mining is essential to humankind and the companies that do it are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and that's fine. But extractive industries are by definition not sustainable and they incur very real health, environmental and infrastructure costs that have to be paid by someone.
Something has gone badly wrong in public policy in this area. Consider:
That's seen our Petroleum Resources Rent Tax proceeds, which in the past delivered around $2 billion a year, plummet. In fact, by the time we overtake Qatar for global gas domination, it's anticipated our resources tax will collect just $800 million.
Qatar, on the other hand, is expected to receive $26.6 billion in royalties that same year for roughly the same volume of exports.
From here in Norway we just look across the North Sea to see the same foolishness in the UK. The UK just wasted the North Sea oil, none of it was invested for the future. Of course the UK has 15 times the population of Norway so an oil fund would not have the same impact on the population but it would surely have helped a lot to cushion the country against the bad times. But I think the Norwegian experience is hard to export; solidarity and a social conscience are much more popular here than in many other countries. Large numbers of people here, including politicians, really do believe that "We are all in it together".
No, it's not paradise, but with continued vigilance it can go a long way towards it.
> In Australia, it went mostly into the profits of companies headquartered overseas and the government negotiated with them so badly and/or corruptly that it's managing to run a budget deficit.
That's incorrect. Australians have a higher median net worth than Norway (100% higher in fact!), thanks to the commodity boom (which prompted the real estate boom). Look at where the number was 20 years ago compared to the rest of the world, versus where it's at now. You can also track that exact same thing in the median income and the GDP per capita, they all simultaneously skyrocketed.
Australia's median net worth per capita figure, is higher than Luxembourg. It's 100% higher than the UK, Japan, Iceland. It's nearly four times that of Sweden (!).
Australia went from having a GDP per capita half that of the US in 2000/2001, to having a higher GDP per capita than the US by 2010 (now back to being slightly below the US, thanks to the dollar run). Median incomes in Australia have soared in line, as witnessed by the $17.70 minimum wage (which only a handful of countries could ever attempt / support). All of that was due to the commodity boom, driven mostly by China.
Today, Australia has a standard of living nearly unheard of in the history of humanity. It has clearly surpassed Norway. Whether it ends in a bust - as it's heavily chained to both commodities and real estate - is the question.
GDP, minimum wage, median net worth are all essentially meaningless. My house here in Perth is "worth" AU$700k, 4 years ago it was "worth" AU$850k. Medium house prices in Aus is $630k. The current US$ exchange rate is 0.75.
I pay AU$60 for a box of Little Creatures pale ale, AU$5 for a flat white, $AU12 for a nice Pat Thai. AU$1.26 for a liter of petrol.
I earn about AU$110k/year.
Real estate in Aus is, as you probably know, a real systemic risk. Australians household debt to GDP sits at 123%, at the end of an unprecedented resource boom. Something is wrong with this picture.
You say that as though big companies and government are not part of us. They are. We elect them and work for them. We also make extensive use of the resources they extract for the enormous benefit of everyone.
Honestly, I never know what to believe when I read these articles. A good friend of mine was on the board of a major oil company - and he told me stories about the backroom deals involving huge investments. Huge projects were really pay-offs to one country which would in-turn take actions impacting another country and resulting in furthering the oil company's goals (which weren't always just direct profit. Politicians put in power - groups hurt or supported - payback for favors from years before - actions to influence major court decisions years in the future.) Oil companies act in completely opaque ways.
At this point, I'm really just convinced that we need public involvement with all decisions by all powerful organizations - whether government or business. Nobody is on our side at these places.
This headline seems inaccurate, it's just not expanding further it seems? The headline sounds like they're turning out the lights and going home.
First paragraph:
"Chevron Corp. has signaled the end of major new LNG projects in Western Australia and is unlikely to sanction an expansion of its Gorgon and Wheatstone export developments as it focuses on boosting returns from $88 billion of investment."
59 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadA lot of that $88 billion (Gorgon and Wheatstone) was spent on local labour and supplies. And Gorgon was one capital project. At the height of the boom, there were hundreds of billions of dollars of capital projects underway simultaneously across Australia.
When I was last in SF a few months ago it reminded me of Perth at the height of the boom.
And I found it unsettling.
In Australia it's mostly along some of the coast. In Canada it's mostly in a small strip just to the north of the USA.
Contrast to Europe. Lots of population everywhere. Contrast to the USA. The eastern third of the country is quite developed, as is a good part of California.
Here’s a map: https://johnstonarchitects.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/pop_l...
[1]: I have to qualify it with "the parts I fly over" because obviously I'm flying over the southern part of the state. Head north and you start getting vast tracks of wilderness, and the upper peninsula is effectively not populated. There's just a few beads of "civilization" tied together by some fairly long roads, which are themselves most of the rest of the "civilization", and then it's square mile after square mile of wilderness.
So, yes, Texas is comparatively under-developed.
It fits a pattern that also fits Australia and Canada... people don't want to live as much where it is extremely dry, or extremely hot / cold.
Perth circa 2011/2012 was quite the boom town.
Of my friends who graduated in 2012/2013 and found jobs in O&G/Mining, most of them have since moved interstate/internationally and switched from resources to different industries or gone back to study after the boom receded. But for a while there engineering graduates were going straight into 120k salaries doing fly-in-fly-out work on mine sites.
Take natural gas (mostly methane) out of the ground. Cool it until it turns into a liquid (aka LNG) and takes less than 2% of the volume of the gas. Put it into ships. Sail ships to countries like Japan. Turn liquid back into gas and use it for e.g. power generation.
No one wants "stranded" gas, but it would be up to the Government of Australia to set up the pipeline to its major cities. I'm sure such a pipeline exists, but given the quantity of gas available, Australia may not be able to use it all.
Soon there will be some big LNG projects coming online in the USA. Two that are not just proposals but are in various stages of construction are:
http://www.cheniere.com/terminals/sabine-pass/
https://www.dom.com/covepoint
The two projects I linked to were delayed by many years. So the fact that there is substantial construction at both sites is a big deal. The fact that Cheniere is actually exporting LNG right now is an even bigger deal.
The real point though is that the negative externalities are not included in the cost of production, because we as a society do not attribute their cost to the company that causes them.
The simplistic example is the company that pollutes the local water and the overall health of people in the community goes down. Even without major sicknesses and death, if it causes an average of an extra sick day per year for the local people, that's a major impact on the entire region[1].
But then what if we look at hard a little more removed? What if the river pollution affects other industries more directly? For example,if there's a ranch bordering the river, what if it makes the cattle sick, even just sicker than normal? What if it affects Salmon spawning downstream? These are all costs borne by others, so are not accounted for in the cost of the product the original company produces, but we all pay for it in litttle or big ways.
What if it just affects a species negatively without an industry behind it? If it's causing the extinction of some fish or frog species, what is the cost of that? You could say it negatively affects even human being in some small way to cause an extinction, but I don't know how to quantify the cost.
Originally we didn't account negative externalities because we didn't know it mattered. In the few cases where it was obvious we used the courts to deal with it. Now we're learning (or have learned) that things are interconnected much more than we believed, but we're stuck with a bunch of industries that are used to not paying for this, and a public that's used to the current costs of goods and services, and it's hard to change that. But hard to change doesn't mean it's economically sound.
1: http://ohvec.org/mountaintop-removal-articles/health/
The "market price" is off by roughly seven orders of magnitude, for petroleum.
Burning petroleum or coal is much more like burning diamonds than wood, economically and geologically. And if you look at the history of how we got here, especially the law and economics, the scientific basis for those assumptions was tremendously flawed.
https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Capture
It's a complicated story, I'm working on putting it together.
Assigning gas a $20,000,000/gallon value based on crude extrapolations of what biomass it would take to replace gas, without doing hardcore economic modelling on the price elasticity of demand, the availability of substitutes, and explaining the assumptions you've made to determine what's the right discount rate to use on the future value of the stored resource – and, indeed, of the value of the environment and humanity's future in general?
That's little better than pulling the numbers out of your ass. The world isn't linear enough to just do things like that.
There's a reason I'm suggesting order-of-magnitude ranges for pricing errors rather than specific dollar amounts to any level of precision, and I'm willing to suggest a 3-8 OOM range (1,000 to 100,000,000) range based on available data.
A nonrenewable resource, economically, is one whose market price fails to account for the time costs of natural formation, such that rates of consumption exceed rates of restoration.
The relevant number from Dukes' paper, by the way, isn't strictly the biomass required, but the accumulation period of that biomass: roughly 5 million years of ancient accumulation per present year of usage (as of 1997). Another source, Reinventing Fire (Amory Lovins et al) gives the value of 17 million times higher a usage than accumulation rate.
Either way, this represents an off-books financing either in the form of debt (as many represent it) or a draw-down of capital stock or savings (as I prefer to view it), which present economic theory fails to account for.
It needn't do this, and I've been exploring how and why the present circumstance and economic mythology (to use economist Thorstein Veblen's term) emerged.
Adam Smith defines costs as the total factors of input, which would include natural factors and their factors, including formation time. David Ricardo presumed land rents (from which natural resource rents theory emerged) were based on "the original and indestructible qualities of the soil", two false premises. Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall, and Menger discussed theories of cost far more comprehensive than the minimalistic and incomplete marginal theories now dominant (and causing numerous problems throughout microeconomics). The formative papers on natural resource and exhaustive resource pricing (Gray, 1914, Hotelling, 1931) fail to cite any geological references.
At the same time that this theory (or mythology) was forming and extractive fossil-fuel industries were forming, the understanding of geological scales and processes was itself undergoing a phenomenal revolution. As of Smith's time, understanding of the age of the Earth ranged from Ussher's ~6,000 years to ... "unknowably long" (Hutton), with estimates developing over the course of the 19th century of from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years, though Lord Kelvin and other estimates ranging in the 20-40 million year range, based on understandings of thermodynamics ... and an ignorance of radioactivity. It was in this period that the legal models of property over mineral resources were established, largely Rule of Capture, with significant jurisprudence in 1804 (Post v. Priestly), the 1880s (oil & gas, W. Va. and Penn.), and 1904 (Texas). That law saw modifications in the 1930s due to advances in geological structural but not temporal understanding, and still remains largely in effect today in Texas and elsewhere (Daintith, several publications).
Chasing value manages to confound the fact that cost, price, and value are in fact three separate properties, though related. I call into question the environmental economic practice of trying to assign "use value" to various environmental factors without also taking into account the creation costs, net of environmental factors of production. I'm still thinking through full implications of this: entropy increases, so there's a net loss throughout the system, but there are more...
Well put. This is why I get excited about SpaceX news. It, and other commercial space ventures, seem like the very beginnings of a formation of a plan to shuttle people to the other lifeboats we see around us. It doesn't actually solve the problem, but often it's easier to make better decisions the second time around...
> I'm quite aware that this is not orthodox economic thinking.
I wouldn't say it's entirely unorthodox economic thinking, just unorthodox practice. I would hazard most economists understand this, and likely agree to a greater or lesser degree, but sit somewhere around "believe it will self correct", "don't know how to change it" and "don't think it's a problem" on what to do about it depending on ideology.
That said, I'll maintain that outer space is, net net, a sink, not a source, and that there is no Earth2 within reach. At best we've a handful of solid bodies, most of which are moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and possibly some interesting mineral resources.
The fundamental problem we've got to tackle is one of understanding the concept of, assessing the magnituded of, and living within, limits. I don't see much sign of that having happened.
As for the economics, there are a number of places at which I depart sharply with orthodoxy, and I'm trying to assess just what those are. There are a few economists from whom I find some agreement and inspiration, though that's only a few, and going through and assessing theory is time consuming.
As long as we're pretending to talk economics of any sort, orthodox or otherwise, the only cost that matters is the opportunity cost. All those millions of years replacing the oil in the ground? There's no opportunity cost to that. No one gave up any second-best alternative. That was just the ecosystem doing it's thing. And, it's a sunk cost, to boot. It is fact now. There is nothing to do about it.
So the only questions that matter here are what is the best possible alternative that we could possibly imagine for the future which we give up by extracting this gallon of gasoline and how should we compare that to 2017 dollars (how to discount the future, or even whether to do so).
If you think we can achieve output with same value as humanity currently regards 10 million bushels of corn by leaving just 1 gallon of gasoline's worth of petroleum in the ground, I'd like to hear why and how, because that's an extraordinary claim, and if they were actually real we could pay for a lot of alternative energy sources with these fantastical savings.
1. You are in an office, with an office-supply cabinet. Your costs of accessing new supplies are the time it takes you to walk to the cabinet and obtain them. At some point, those supplies must be re-ordered. What is the property accounting mechanism for those supplies?
2. You've come into an inheritance. It represents the accumulated earnings of several lifetimes of your benefactors. You are limited to withdrawing a maximum amount of money in a given visit, and each visit requires cross-town travel and cab fare. How do you account for the depletion of this fund? Do you include your own time costs? The cab fare? An accounting for the depletion of the fund itself? An accounting of the costs of restoring withdrawn funds?
How does this change if your own present earning potential is only a very small fraction of the current fund? If the fund represents, say, the equivalent if 5 million ancestors' lifetime earnings?
3. You and 63 others are in a lifeboat, floating adrift, a year from the nearest opportunity for rescue. There is food and water aboard the lifeboat, but only sufficient to keep a maximum of 16 alive for that period. How do you account for the usage and decide on allocation of those supplies?
I'm well aware of opportunity costs, and of sunk costs.
For the former, I'm fairly convinced that the opportunities are not fully enumerated in current accounting, and that the economic, financial, and legal doctrines as I've described briefly above are based on world-models strongly at odds with the actual world-state.
Of sunk costs, I'm no longer convinced that the sunk-cost fallacy is entirely valid. Again, not an original idea -- spend some time looking up "sunk cost fallacy fallacy". Gwern's essay on the topic is among the more interesting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9si/is_sunk_cost_fallacy_a_fallacy/ http://www.gwern.net/Sunk%20cost
There are a number of dimensions of this, and I'm not convinced I've explored all of them, but in the specific case of fossil fuels, a particular problem is that there is no accounting for the depletion of the resource itself. At a time when present rates of consumption accounted for a millionth or less the total resource (NB: not "proved reserves" or "economic reserves"), as was documented by several authors of coal in the 1880s, that might have been excusable. Funny thing is that exponential rates of increase have ... increased, and even in the case of the most abundant fossil resource (coal), that millionfold supply-to-present-consumption relationship has fallen to a factor of perhaps 100x. In other mineral resources we're looking at far smaller numbers (I've referenced a few such lists at https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius).
The problem with economic accounting such as you suggest -- best possible alternatives, future value, current prices, real currency -- is that it seems to me the accounting fails on multiple premises. Hotelling, incidentally, proposes just this in his 1931 paper, and it's one of several places in which I feel his analysis fails.
H.L. Gray, "Rent Under the Assumption of Exhaustibility" (1914) describes Ricardo's conclusions:
1. Price should increase over time.
2. Spot price is set by the highest cost-of-extraction mine.
3. Owners with lower costs earn a differential rent.
The 2nd and 3rd conclusions match observed experiences in oil especially -- a resource with exceptionally good pricing history, dating ...
Recklessly implausible.
Many consider it a stepping stone in between now and a future with no hydrocarbon fuel.
That was just one result on Google, you will find plenty more. Using Natural Gas is the #1 reason CO2 emissions have dropped in the US (and other countries).
So if LNG terminal reduces flaring, it's "green energy" project. But if it is to increase fracking, it's just fossil fuels project.
Natural gas is green energy because it's reducing dirty coal power plants. LNG terminals have nothing to do with fracking. LNG terminals are just an export facility.
Of course mining is essential to humankind and the companies that do it are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and that's fine. But extractive industries are by definition not sustainable and they incur very real health, environmental and infrastructure costs that have to be paid by someone.
Recommended reading: https://penguin.com.au/books/boom-the-underground-history-of...
That's seen our Petroleum Resources Rent Tax proceeds, which in the past delivered around $2 billion a year, plummet. In fact, by the time we overtake Qatar for global gas domination, it's anticipated our resources tax will collect just $800 million.
Qatar, on the other hand, is expected to receive $26.6 billion in royalties that same year for roughly the same volume of exports.
(from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-20/ian-verrender-how-the-... )
No, it's not paradise, but with continued vigilance it can go a long way towards it.
That's incorrect. Australians have a higher median net worth than Norway (100% higher in fact!), thanks to the commodity boom (which prompted the real estate boom). Look at where the number was 20 years ago compared to the rest of the world, versus where it's at now. You can also track that exact same thing in the median income and the GDP per capita, they all simultaneously skyrocketed.
Australia's median net worth per capita figure, is higher than Luxembourg. It's 100% higher than the UK, Japan, Iceland. It's nearly four times that of Sweden (!).
Australia went from having a GDP per capita half that of the US in 2000/2001, to having a higher GDP per capita than the US by 2010 (now back to being slightly below the US, thanks to the dollar run). Median incomes in Australia have soared in line, as witnessed by the $17.70 minimum wage (which only a handful of countries could ever attempt / support). All of that was due to the commodity boom, driven mostly by China.
Today, Australia has a standard of living nearly unheard of in the history of humanity. It has clearly surpassed Norway. Whether it ends in a bust - as it's heavily chained to both commodities and real estate - is the question.
I pay AU$60 for a box of Little Creatures pale ale, AU$5 for a flat white, $AU12 for a nice Pat Thai. AU$1.26 for a liter of petrol.
I earn about AU$110k/year.
Real estate in Aus is, as you probably know, a real systemic risk. Australians household debt to GDP sits at 123%, at the end of an unprecedented resource boom. Something is wrong with this picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Basically, if you've got riches under your feet then your government will almost certainly be corrupted by that.
At this point, I'm really just convinced that we need public involvement with all decisions by all powerful organizations - whether government or business. Nobody is on our side at these places.
First paragraph:
"Chevron Corp. has signaled the end of major new LNG projects in Western Australia and is unlikely to sanction an expansion of its Gorgon and Wheatstone export developments as it focuses on boosting returns from $88 billion of investment."