America's best-selling car in 2018 is the F150 series!
American's are going crazy for SUVs and pickups, but the F150 has been the best-selling vehicle for decades. Pickups have outsold passenger vehicles for a long time.
Why are pick-ups so popular? I can understand if you are a construction worker, farmer, etc. that actually needs a pickup truck; but why are they so popular for other people? The vast majority of pickup trucks I see have beds that are so clean that it is obvious that has never been used to haul even one bag of cement or load of dirt.
As long as we live in a global economy we will be hungry for oil. A global economy depends on shipping goods around the world, and for that to work you need a high energy density fuel source, and there is really no alternative nearly as good as oil.
This isn't about SUVs or consumer air travel. The world will need oil for cargo transport to sustain the trade necessary to maintain our economic way of life. Hydrocarbons are high energy density which is an essential property because otherwise your fuel becomes your cargo.
The problem isn't SUVs, it's the fact that your local grocery store has bananas shipped from 10,000 miles away for $0.59/lb. The only way you can make that happen is with oil. All the neat stuff you have shipped to your door from Amazon requires oil. Even if you buy your coffee from a local store and it's roasted by your neighbor it took oil to get it to you.
We could have a 100% renewable grid and we would still need to use hydrocarbons to support global economy
>SUV/pick-up boom (America's best-selling car in 2018 is the F150 series!)
My understanding is that this is a misleading fact - There are less models of SUV in the market than other classes of vehicle, so even if less SUVs, as a class, are sold than other cars, the lack of variance means the total number of a particular model is likely higher than sales of a model in any other class.
While I do not believe we have hit peak oil yet, I do not believe we are far off nor will oil and gas demand continue to grow for "a long time".
- The personal transportation industry will go through the biggest change it ever has in the next decade. Bigger than horse + buggy -> automobiles. An electric car will be cheaper to operate and maintain. Production of EVs will proliferate even countries like China (already happening), India (already happening), and others. Autonomous ride networks, especially in dense urban areas, will also take a massive market share. The need for individuals to own vehicles will decrease in urban and even suburban environments. Couple that with almost any good or service you need being delivered to your door "instantly", the vehicle is no longer needed. The rise of remote working will also contribute to this. Yes, some people like their SUVs/Trucks, but that will pail in comparison to the reduction elsewhere.
- Air travel will grow, assuming economic stability of course. Towards the end of the decade, we will also have short length, all electric aircraft operating. That will shore up the growth of air travel in regards to the demand for more oil.
- Natural Gas growth long term... no way. Not happening. Within this decade, we will see the price of solar and batteries drop to levels never before imagined. Production and efficiency will also greatly increase. We have only just begun. You will have distributed "grids", where many more people are generating their own power, and borrowing from their neighbor when necessary. BRIC countries will also be leading on adopting these types of grids as well, especially in areas where the grid is not stable/doesn't even exist. See Puerto Rico. They have only just begun.
- Yes, the quality of life across the world is getting better. That means the demand for alternative energy and the Capability to pay for the infrastructure is ALSO increasing. This will move the growth needle forward for renewable energy. This will be your peak oil. Your peak oil will be in the past once you see entire areas of housing in BRIC countries running on Solar/batteries. Goodbye. Oil.
Also, I think humanity will do the right thing as a whole. Governments will STOP subsidizing oil like they do today. It will become much more expensive. Peak oil will be in the past at this point as well.
So go on, go invest in your oil companies and throw your arms in the air saying "yes, but it's not my problem, I'm just making money". War profiteers say the same thing. They never come out on the right side of the history book. Neither will you. Oil and Gas will NOT have growth for a long time.
Not sure why but I see the same here, in Berlin. There is even a meme circling about SUVs being just mothers (usually talking on a phone) driving their kids to school.
I have a hard time taking this article too seriously.
>not coming from the usual producers, but from Brazil, Canada, Norway and Guyana — countries that are either not known for oil or whose production has been lackluster in recent years.
Canada ranks 5 in oil exports, Norway 13, Brazil 21. Sure, Guyana belongs in that sentence. But... uh, okay? Rank 5 is "not usual"?
Next part, wtf do you expect? Oil companies are going to bull rush to increase their cash supply in the coming years due to gas car bans coming in the next decades along with the push for renewable energy. Did people actually think these multi billion dollar companies are going to just say, "Oh well, we had a good run. We should take ourselves out to pasture now"?
>Years of moderate gasoline prices have already increased the popularity of bigger cars and sports utility vehicles in the United States
I'm pretty sure that "demand" is a drop in the bucket to the past decade of Chinese demand that's been increasing.
Fun point I really, really like: "The added production in Norway comes despite the country’s embrace of the 2016 Paris climate agreement, which committed nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions."
Hmmm, so Norway taxes the shit out of oil(which they should, don't pretend I'm for oil). What does that mean? Oh, let's see, 2018 oil tax rev was NOK 155 billion (17b USD), 2019 is estimated NOK 176 billion (19b USD). I have a truly difficult time believing that the government will go, "No, we don't want that money! Away with thee!" Especially in a country of 5.3million. That splits to services among their citizens pretty well. Enough that if oil disappeared, there are public services that are going to get cut back pretty badly.
Uh huh. At a 1.2 trillion NOK operating budget (131b USD), it'll hurt to lose, what is that... oil taxes makes 12% of the gov's income? I'm trying to figure out when the memo came out where we all started to believe political rhetoric.
Don't think for a second I'm "for oil". But I'm a realist. A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. Not drum circles, UN circle jerks climate summits with teenagers crying nor bullshit "plant trees" PR stunts(past tree planting stunts have real piss poor success rates of the trees surviving after a year. Single digit percentages. And no one tries to learn from the past ones.)
Also contributing probably is the rising risk that if you don't pump that oil as fast as possible and sell it now, you might never be able to sell it. This is weighing on the Saudi Aramco IPO. Although probably not as much as the general opaque and untrustworthy reports from the Saudis as to how much oil they have left.
We used to worry about peak oil, where a supply crunch would cause the price to skyrocket. Now it's clear it will end in a whimper with demand just trailing off until only the very cheapest producers are still in the market. Too bad Canada, Brazil.
It's a good thing to be clear, and can't happen fast enough.
Norway puts their oil revenue into a fund, and puts the surplus of this fund into their yearly budget (the rule is to use less than 3% of the current value of the fund). This amounts to about 20% of the budget I believe.
I’m in general agreement with you. If governments actually cared about ending ending oil dominance they would continually increase taxes on it to financially force consumers and industry to pursue alternatives. And then use all of those tax revenues to fund renewables, public transit, and climate repair technologies. Outside of a few countries this isn’t even close to what happens in reality. Everyone will continue to squeeze as many dollars as they can out of oil drilling until demand drops to the point where it’s no longer profitable, some number of decades in the future.
I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from an assumption that all the oil in the ground is going to be dug up and burned. It's too much money for some of these countries to ignore - the article mentions Guyana, a poor country that now has a way to print money. It also mentiones Venezuela, the country with the most oil reserves and the country's desperate need for cash.
So, interesting and all, but not even mentioning what is happening to coal the last few years seems like an odd omission. Coal is essentially disappearing from the world's energy mix. As big as coal was, it takes a while to go away completely, but the trend does not seem to be slowing down. By some estimates, there are a lot of cases now where it is more expensive to keep running an existing coal-fired power plant, than to replace it with solar or wind.
So, at least a substantial fraction of this oil is replacing coal, which doesn't mean it's all ok for the climate change issue, but it seems like an important point to be just leaving out of the story entirely.
Coal is down-trending in the USA, but it still makes up 30% of the electricity in the USA. In other countries, especially China and India, coal is expected to be burned in massive quantities for the next couple of decades. Granted, they use much more efficient coal than the US does, but let's not act like coal is disappearing overnight. It's been over 30% of the mix for decades and it will continue to be so, in a global scale, for at least a decade.
I'm afraid coal is not disappearing quickly either, I know someone who works in the mining industry and he tells me that they are still selling a growing amount of mining equipment for coal mines. These things have long lead times. If they sell the stuff now the coal mines will be in operations for decades.
It's not crude oil but natural gas which has been replacing coal in the US. Natural Gas is much better, and given that there is no cost effective practical grid level storage solution, it is likely to stick around in any region which see's high levels of solar and wind power generation.
This is incredibly good news for the developing world in the short- and medium term, but really bad news for the long term. Cheap energy boosts economic growth and well-being. Oil finds its comparative advantage relative to cheap solar.
Reduced use of hydrocarbons in the west is nice but it's not going to offset the demand in the developed world. The growth will slow down and stop in decade or two.
The idea that the developing world will benefit from cheap oil is ridiculous.
The developing world is the one suffering from the impacts of global warming. Several countries in Africa are suffering from wars worsened by climate change driven migrations. Countries like India have a mix of cities running out of water, cities flooded by water and cities drowning in pollution which is almost certainly gonna erase years of people's lives eliminating any improvements caused by better medicine.
Cheap oil, or expensive oil, are both bad for developing countries. It's literally not possible to give the hundreds of millions of people in developing countries a better future with fossil fuel driven growth.
All our thinking and planning has to start from that basic fact.
If we assume the developed world will eventually care to do something about the climate heating in the medium or long term, this is terrible for the developing world.
Build out the infrastructure for oil, the refuelling, without need of a power grid for EVs first. Then find in 2040 or 2050 that the developed world imposes trade sanctions or other pressure for not being carbon neutral. Build an infrastructure for at best twenty years then throw it away.
That's suggesting to build out with the horse and buggy in 1910.
If, on the other hand, the developed world doesn't get their act together, sure it's great news for the developing world in the short term. While the whole planet accelerates over the cliff edge. We can ultimately trim the population more than we did in the Black Death.
The developing nations never pass cheaper oil benefit to the end consumers. They just increase taxes to offset the decrease in price (and thats a good thing). So there won't be any increase in consumption due to low prices.
I feel like there is literally no way for the average person to win this fight. I can't even avoid plastic and oil use in my day-to-day life because I live too far from the only farmers market in town, because its too expensive to live any closer. The only way I can see that I could "win" is by buying a large plot of land and essentially returning to living an 1800s style agricultural lifestyle, but even that would probably be too difficult because of the startup costs to buy the land, house, and equipment. I also don't feel that many politicians understand and are popular enough to combat these issues, what else are we supposed to do?
The amount of CO₂ we produce is correlated with our spending (embedded energy), and our spending is usually related to our income.
If you have a good income, you likely produce a lot of CO₂, but you can also afford to spend some time and money on offsetting activities.
For example, buy a plot of uneconomical farmland and plant good CO₂ absorbers, maybe good nursery trees so you can return land to a more native state. There's heaps of ways to do it, but check you are not being greenwashed.
You do need to do some research: building an energy efficient home, or buying a Tesla feels good but might not actually be effective (and could easily be net producer of CO₂ depending on other factors).
When I spend money, I figure 25% is embedded energy (e.g. employees in chain go on overseas holiday). E.g. I guess $8 spent uses a litre of petrochemicals.
Edit: if anyone has good pointers to information about embedded energy per dollar, I am interested. The above comment is mostly from my own thought experiments.
The people who make money in industries that pollute would love for you to keep buying into the myth of personal responsibility. We saw this with cigarette and drink companies with the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign, a wildly successful PR move that shifted the blame for litter 100% to the consumer.
"Vote with your wallet" is valid, but it also takes the heat off of our elected representatives and regulators. We need to hold them to account for their failure to force companies to factor destructive externalities into their accounting. Vote with your vote, to hit companies in their wallets.
It sucks that as BEVs chase ICEs and become more prevalent that will drop demand of oil and therefore oil will get cheaper.
I only hope that the higher extraction costs of current reserves make a floor for gasoline that supply/demand curves can't go under fundamentally, and that BEVs can beat that.
But a goddamn rational, common sense carbon tax would fix a whole lot of things that are wrong with the world.
The US had the single largest increases in crude oil and LNG production in history in previous years. These other smaller producers are a drop in the bucket compared to the massive increases seen in the USA. These two stark facts may help explain why US politicians are reticent to back climate science or carbon taxation...why would they back something to curtail resource extraction that's making a KILLING in their red states? Especially when they get a tidy % of that killing in campaign donations and PAC-support.
If we think of climate denial and obstructionism through this lens, it makes the GOP a lot easier to comprehend.
I think you are off here. California, Colorado and New Mexico are all in the top ten of oil production.
Yes, some states are "red" and they tend to like their fossil fuels. But they may be "red" in part because of their oil production, not the other way around.
Also, many traditional "red" states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Indiana, Oklahoma, Florida, North and South Dakota have shown to be very interested in increasing wind[1] and solar[2] energy capacities.
It's not surprising that oil producers see the writing on the wall. If they don't sell their reserves now, they'll either get a lower prices for them later (because of lower demand as people switch to electric vehicles etc.), or won't be able to sell them as a result of future legislation.
But making the price low now enables something they might not like -- it makes it cheaper to enact a carbon tax, because consumers won't feel it as much. Especially if you use it to fund a dividend, you can then make the tax (and corresponding dividend) quite large, and not get many complaints because people are getting back more than increase in fuel cost over what they're accustomed to paying.
If gas drops to $2/gallon when people are used to $3, raising it to $4 with a tax but then giving everyone the $2 back makes people happy, because now they have an extra $1 at the expense of the oil companies. And an extra $2 if they buy an electric car.
"I hope that humanity will be able to free itself from its addiction of fossil fuels (arguably it is the primary reason for violent conflict in the last 30 years and the driving force behind climate change), but my bet is that things will get worse for a lot longer before we even reach the inflection point of “peak oil”.
Change must happen. Change will happen. I don’t think the oil and gas industry is anywhere near to disappearing. Given the current valuation of many integrated oil majors, the favorable growth and interest rate environment, I believe that it is a good time to invest in oil companies."
I love the cynicism of this perspective: We are well aware the world will burn because of this technology, but hey, you can make a buck now, so keep perpetuating the status quo. These kind of opinions are so frustrating.
I still genuinely don't understand the elitist and patronizing view that developing and/or developed countries should just stop traveling by air or travel significantly less by air?
In reality, even if all the rich people stopped flying on planes, plenty of other people would just keep doing it. I don't think poor people really care too much about being guilted by rich people, led alone being told someone else knows better than them how they should spend their hard earned money / live their lives.
What happened then? Better mapping tools to identify oil-bearing structures, and better catalysts to crack oil. Those catalysts have been worked on since then and they're many times bigger now (I can't recall why this matters).
At some point we developed horizontal drilling. All these things were too expensive when oil was cheaper. What other processes are waiting in the wings?
Its important to realise that oil is not just for energy but for the 95% of products, machinery and materials that make modern life possible. Roughly 50% is for other things than energy and without oil most of us would either not live today And live much poorer lives.
Whenever we grow, the universe will test us. This is an example of temptation, will we resist? Will we find another way? Or will we double down on our biggest existential threat.
Am I looking at this the wrong way? Help me to understand a more reasonable way to look at it.
[+] [-] mxschumacher|6 years ago|reply
- SUV/pick-up boom (America's best-selling car in 2018 is the F150 series!) and more cars + trucks in countries like Brazil, India, China, Indonesia
- crazy growth in air travel (look at order numbers of Airbus, see how many airports are under construction, see miles traveled via plane)
- simultaneous shift away from coal+ nuclear, giving a huge boost to natural gas in the long term (LNG build-out is only now beginning)
- the world getting richer (more and more humans are living like Westerners). We're on a path towards $100tn/y world GDP and 10bn humans.
I provide more detail + resources on my blog: https://mxschumacher.xyz/post/long_oil_and_gas/
[+] [-] ben010783|6 years ago|reply
American's are going crazy for SUVs and pickups, but the F150 has been the best-selling vehicle for decades. Pickups have outsold passenger vehicles for a long time.
[+] [-] irrational|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baron_harkonnen|6 years ago|reply
This isn't about SUVs or consumer air travel. The world will need oil for cargo transport to sustain the trade necessary to maintain our economic way of life. Hydrocarbons are high energy density which is an essential property because otherwise your fuel becomes your cargo.
The problem isn't SUVs, it's the fact that your local grocery store has bananas shipped from 10,000 miles away for $0.59/lb. The only way you can make that happen is with oil. All the neat stuff you have shipped to your door from Amazon requires oil. Even if you buy your coffee from a local store and it's roasted by your neighbor it took oil to get it to you.
We could have a 100% renewable grid and we would still need to use hydrocarbons to support global economy
[+] [-] FooHentai|6 years ago|reply
My understanding is that this is a misleading fact - There are less models of SUV in the market than other classes of vehicle, so even if less SUVs, as a class, are sold than other cars, the lack of variance means the total number of a particular model is likely higher than sales of a model in any other class.
[+] [-] Cshelton|6 years ago|reply
While I do not believe we have hit peak oil yet, I do not believe we are far off nor will oil and gas demand continue to grow for "a long time".
- The personal transportation industry will go through the biggest change it ever has in the next decade. Bigger than horse + buggy -> automobiles. An electric car will be cheaper to operate and maintain. Production of EVs will proliferate even countries like China (already happening), India (already happening), and others. Autonomous ride networks, especially in dense urban areas, will also take a massive market share. The need for individuals to own vehicles will decrease in urban and even suburban environments. Couple that with almost any good or service you need being delivered to your door "instantly", the vehicle is no longer needed. The rise of remote working will also contribute to this. Yes, some people like their SUVs/Trucks, but that will pail in comparison to the reduction elsewhere.
- Air travel will grow, assuming economic stability of course. Towards the end of the decade, we will also have short length, all electric aircraft operating. That will shore up the growth of air travel in regards to the demand for more oil.
- Natural Gas growth long term... no way. Not happening. Within this decade, we will see the price of solar and batteries drop to levels never before imagined. Production and efficiency will also greatly increase. We have only just begun. You will have distributed "grids", where many more people are generating their own power, and borrowing from their neighbor when necessary. BRIC countries will also be leading on adopting these types of grids as well, especially in areas where the grid is not stable/doesn't even exist. See Puerto Rico. They have only just begun.
- Yes, the quality of life across the world is getting better. That means the demand for alternative energy and the Capability to pay for the infrastructure is ALSO increasing. This will move the growth needle forward for renewable energy. This will be your peak oil. Your peak oil will be in the past once you see entire areas of housing in BRIC countries running on Solar/batteries. Goodbye. Oil.
Also, I think humanity will do the right thing as a whole. Governments will STOP subsidizing oil like they do today. It will become much more expensive. Peak oil will be in the past at this point as well.
So go on, go invest in your oil companies and throw your arms in the air saying "yes, but it's not my problem, I'm just making money". War profiteers say the same thing. They never come out on the right side of the history book. Neither will you. Oil and Gas will NOT have growth for a long time.
[+] [-] odiroot|6 years ago|reply
Not sure why but I see the same here, in Berlin. There is even a meme circling about SUVs being just mothers (usually talking on a phone) driving their kids to school.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jliptzin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corodra|6 years ago|reply
>not coming from the usual producers, but from Brazil, Canada, Norway and Guyana — countries that are either not known for oil or whose production has been lackluster in recent years.
Canada ranks 5 in oil exports, Norway 13, Brazil 21. Sure, Guyana belongs in that sentence. But... uh, okay? Rank 5 is "not usual"?
Next part, wtf do you expect? Oil companies are going to bull rush to increase their cash supply in the coming years due to gas car bans coming in the next decades along with the push for renewable energy. Did people actually think these multi billion dollar companies are going to just say, "Oh well, we had a good run. We should take ourselves out to pasture now"?
>Years of moderate gasoline prices have already increased the popularity of bigger cars and sports utility vehicles in the United States
I'm pretty sure that "demand" is a drop in the bucket to the past decade of Chinese demand that's been increasing.
Fun point I really, really like: "The added production in Norway comes despite the country’s embrace of the 2016 Paris climate agreement, which committed nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions."
Hmmm, so Norway taxes the shit out of oil(which they should, don't pretend I'm for oil). What does that mean? Oh, let's see, 2018 oil tax rev was NOK 155 billion (17b USD), 2019 is estimated NOK 176 billion (19b USD). I have a truly difficult time believing that the government will go, "No, we don't want that money! Away with thee!" Especially in a country of 5.3million. That splits to services among their citizens pretty well. Enough that if oil disappeared, there are public services that are going to get cut back pretty badly.
Uh huh. At a 1.2 trillion NOK operating budget (131b USD), it'll hurt to lose, what is that... oil taxes makes 12% of the gov's income? I'm trying to figure out when the memo came out where we all started to believe political rhetoric.
Don't think for a second I'm "for oil". But I'm a realist. A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. Not drum circles, UN circle jerks climate summits with teenagers crying nor bullshit "plant trees" PR stunts(past tree planting stunts have real piss poor success rates of the trees surviving after a year. Single digit percentages. And no one tries to learn from the past ones.)
[+] [-] eloff|6 years ago|reply
We used to worry about peak oil, where a supply crunch would cause the price to skyrocket. Now it's clear it will end in a whimper with demand just trailing off until only the very cheapest producers are still in the market. Too bad Canada, Brazil.
It's a good thing to be clear, and can't happen fast enough.
[+] [-] andersns|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action?
[+] [-] christophilus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdorazio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
So, at least a substantial fraction of this oil is replacing coal, which doesn't mean it's all ok for the climate change issue, but it seems like an important point to be just leaving out of the story entirely.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|6 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-by-source?stackMode=a...
[+] [-] onepointsixC|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
Globally liquid fuel production and consumption just goes up year after year https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig6.png
Reduced use of hydrocarbons in the west is nice but it's not going to offset the demand in the developed world. The growth will slow down and stop in decade or two.
[+] [-] jdjdjjsjs|6 years ago|reply
The developing world is the one suffering from the impacts of global warming. Several countries in Africa are suffering from wars worsened by climate change driven migrations. Countries like India have a mix of cities running out of water, cities flooded by water and cities drowning in pollution which is almost certainly gonna erase years of people's lives eliminating any improvements caused by better medicine.
Cheap oil, or expensive oil, are both bad for developing countries. It's literally not possible to give the hundreds of millions of people in developing countries a better future with fossil fuel driven growth.
All our thinking and planning has to start from that basic fact.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
Build out the infrastructure for oil, the refuelling, without need of a power grid for EVs first. Then find in 2040 or 2050 that the developed world imposes trade sanctions or other pressure for not being carbon neutral. Build an infrastructure for at best twenty years then throw it away.
That's suggesting to build out with the horse and buggy in 1910.
If, on the other hand, the developed world doesn't get their act together, sure it's great news for the developing world in the short term. While the whole planet accelerates over the cliff edge. We can ultimately trim the population more than we did in the Black Death.
[+] [-] option_greek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
I heard exact same statement a decade or two ago.
[+] [-] pastor_elm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ancalagon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robocat|6 years ago|reply
If you have a good income, you likely produce a lot of CO₂, but you can also afford to spend some time and money on offsetting activities.
For example, buy a plot of uneconomical farmland and plant good CO₂ absorbers, maybe good nursery trees so you can return land to a more native state. There's heaps of ways to do it, but check you are not being greenwashed.
You do need to do some research: building an energy efficient home, or buying a Tesla feels good but might not actually be effective (and could easily be net producer of CO₂ depending on other factors).
When I spend money, I figure 25% is embedded energy (e.g. employees in chain go on overseas holiday). E.g. I guess $8 spent uses a litre of petrochemicals.
Edit: if anyone has good pointers to information about embedded energy per dollar, I am interested. The above comment is mostly from my own thought experiments.
[+] [-] asteli|6 years ago|reply
"Vote with your wallet" is valid, but it also takes the heat off of our elected representatives and regulators. We need to hold them to account for their failure to force companies to factor destructive externalities into their accounting. Vote with your vote, to hit companies in their wallets.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
2. Support those politicians, and oppose the others
3. Drive less, drive more efficiently
4. Eat less beef, also waste less food
5. Use less heat and cooling energy
6. Bike, walk, or public transport whenever possible
Just 6 areas I think about.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|6 years ago|reply
It sucks that as BEVs chase ICEs and become more prevalent that will drop demand of oil and therefore oil will get cheaper.
I only hope that the higher extraction costs of current reserves make a floor for gasoline that supply/demand curves can't go under fundamentally, and that BEVs can beat that.
But a goddamn rational, common sense carbon tax would fix a whole lot of things that are wrong with the world.
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
If we think of climate denial and obstructionism through this lens, it makes the GOP a lot easier to comprehend.
[+] [-] frogpelt|6 years ago|reply
Yes, some states are "red" and they tend to like their fossil fuels. But they may be "red" in part because of their oil production, not the other way around.
Also, many traditional "red" states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, Indiana, Oklahoma, Florida, North and South Dakota have shown to be very interested in increasing wind[1] and solar[2] energy capacities.
Sources:
[1]: https://www.power-technology.com/features/us-wind-energy-by-...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/19/the-us-states-leading-the-wa...
[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|6 years ago|reply
But making the price low now enables something they might not like -- it makes it cheaper to enact a carbon tax, because consumers won't feel it as much. Especially if you use it to fund a dividend, you can then make the tax (and corresponding dividend) quite large, and not get many complaints because people are getting back more than increase in fuel cost over what they're accustomed to paying.
If gas drops to $2/gallon when people are used to $3, raising it to $4 with a tax but then giving everyone the $2 back makes people happy, because now they have an extra $1 at the expense of the oil companies. And an extra $2 if they buy an electric car.
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torpfactory|6 years ago|reply
Change must happen. Change will happen. I don’t think the oil and gas industry is anywhere near to disappearing. Given the current valuation of many integrated oil majors, the favorable growth and interest rate environment, I believe that it is a good time to invest in oil companies."
I love the cynicism of this perspective: We are well aware the world will burn because of this technology, but hey, you can make a buck now, so keep perpetuating the status quo. These kind of opinions are so frustrating.
[+] [-] algaeontoast|6 years ago|reply
In reality, even if all the rich people stopped flying on planes, plenty of other people would just keep doing it. I don't think poor people really care too much about being guilted by rich people, led alone being told someone else knows better than them how they should spend their hard earned money / live their lives.
[+] [-] olivermarks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
What happened then? Better mapping tools to identify oil-bearing structures, and better catalysts to crack oil. Those catalysts have been worked on since then and they're many times bigger now (I can't recall why this matters).
At some point we developed horizontal drilling. All these things were too expensive when oil was cheaper. What other processes are waiting in the wings?
[+] [-] Tepix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfortuny|6 years ago|reply
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/08/norways-1tn-we...
[+] [-] hodder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|6 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2018/06/29/what-ev...
[+] [-] swebs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikelyons|6 years ago|reply
Am I looking at this the wrong way? Help me to understand a more reasonable way to look at it.
[+] [-] mlinksva|6 years ago|reply