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Why We Have To Kiss Off Big Carbon Now
mdsolar writes When the fossil-fuel divestment movement first stirred on college campuses three years ago, you could almost hear Big Oil and Wall Street laughing. Crude prices were flirting with $100 a barrel, and domestic oil production, from Texas to North Dakota, was in the midst of a historic boom. But the quixotic campus campaign suddenly has the smell of smart money.
One of the biggest names in the history of Big Oil – the Rockefellers – announced last September that they would be purging the portfolio of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of 'risky' oil investments. And that risk has been underscored by the sudden collapse of the oil market. After cresting at more than $107 in mid-June, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate dipped below $50 a barrel in early January. The crash carries big costs: Goldman Sachs warned that nearly $1 trillion in planned oil-field investments would be unprofitable – even if oil were to stabilize at $70 per barrel.
One of the biggest names in the history of Big Oil – the Rockefellers – announced last September that they would be purging the portfolio of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of 'risky' oil investments. And that risk has been underscored by the sudden collapse of the oil market. After cresting at more than $107 in mid-June, the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate dipped below $50 a barrel in early January. The crash carries big costs: Goldman Sachs warned that nearly $1 trillion in planned oil-field investments would be unprofitable – even if oil were to stabilize at $70 per barrel.
...and put all my money into bitcoin! Oh wait...
And here's the problem with free market capitalism. Now we have abandoned wellsites that nobody wants to cleanup, unemployed oil workers & related fields, and bankrupt communities that were struggling to build infrastructure during the boom now have empty roads & schools. Give it 10-15 years and we'll start the cycle all over again. This carries across to other markets, we've seen it before with the steel belt turning into the rust belt.
Yes, the free market fixes it, but not until the damage is done. You end up with an economic system where capital is rushing from one end to other at the expense of labor. It's like some new era of hunter/gathering nomads; you have people following the buffalo around.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or if you really are an actual retard.
Greed breeds myopia. Always has. Did people investing heavily in oil really think it would either keep going up, or sustain at the price peaks it was at for years? At those prices, it's all but strangling the economy. It started to actually effect just how much people drove!
And there's the problem. Oil is still king of the economy. From home energy, to the dinner table. Oil is still king. I think a good many investors forgot who just has the real power in the world. Guess the Saudis thought they should remind them.
The frustrating thing with this though, is that we still won't see the prices drop at the grocery or market, even though it's cheaper to ship goods and produce. Why pass savings onto the consumer, when you can pad the profit margin for the quarter, and stock-holders. I think a lot of people forget that, milk, bread, fruit, etc... should all be a little cheaper at the moment. It won't be.
The many thousands of wells that are/were planned for completion will simply be postponed until the market responds more favorably, but don't kid yourself, they will become feasible again at some point.
Lower energy costs will fuel the self same economic recovery that will drive World prices back into the realm of profitability.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
1) By definition, there is a finite supply of non-renewable energy.
2) And we use tons of it.
3) And for the good of humanity you want the price to be HIGH
Reasons you want the price to be high for fossil fuels:
1) Conversation of the resource. Airplanes must use fossil fuels the way they are designed now. Cars = no. You can have electric cars.
2) When the price of fossil fuels is low, they get wasted. Your neighbor who drives alone and isn't a farmer buying a huge truck is NOT how non-renewable energy should be used.
3) Complacency about alternative energy because the price of gas is low isn't a positive.
I am sure there are a lot of "lefty partisans" who are enjoying this because they dislike Big Oil -- and to that extent, it more proves that it isn't about results with partisans, it is about their "team". If the price of oil drops like a rock, there is a bit of financial relief but what really happens is consumption sky-rockets.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Make sure you are an informed investor, though. The reason oil prices dropped is because of a massive new increase in supply. At least some of it can be profitable at $40 a barrel (shale drilling techniques have rapidly gotten cheaper).
The last time oil had a drastic drop in price due to new supply was in the 80s. Back then, it was nearly two decades before prices came back up, as increasing Chinese demand started to max out the supply.
Now is not the same as the 80s, either. Technologies are being developed that can drop demand by 40% or more. As electric cars become more and more common (and there's every reason to believe they will), oil usage will drop accordingly, and oil prices will drop as well. In some scenarios, it could be a century before oil prices return to what they were.
Or maybe not. But you should know what the risks are before you make any investment (and don't believe it just because some loudmouth like me said it on Slashdot, go investigate it yourself. Take responsibility for your investments).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Some of us are doing quite a lot ourselves, actually. Starting a couple years ago I actually started refusing to commute to do work that can be done just as well over the internet. Sure, it meant turning down some jobs, but it also cut my total miles driven per year (at low speed in stop-and-go traffic no less) by thousands, and my total gasoline consumption by a factor of over 90%, and though I didn't plant a tree (I don't own any land to plant it on), I did plant an herb garden on my balcony.
I am not a greenie and I don't tell others what they should or should not do but...
I don't consider myself a "greenie" either honestly, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you totally just did tell us all what we should and should not do. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying we should and should not do either, I'm just saying you did tell us exactly that, and you're not the only one doing it. There are lots of us, and the numbers are quietly growing. The telecommuting revolution is long overdue.
Plant a tree, move closer to your work, sell your car and instead use car sharing services and transit. Stop telling "us" what to do and make definitive changes yourselves. I am not a greenie and I don't tell others what they should or should not do
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lol.
i work from home. i haven't 'commuted' for years and years. i don't drive. my kid gets jogged into school. i garden and buy food from the farmers' market which is about 200 feet from my house, and the rest comes from a store at the end of the block. i don't go on vacation places.
so i guess in spite of not considering myself to be a "greenie", i have earned the right to call you a fucking retard.
congratulations! you're a fucking retard.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Grow up, and learn how the world really works.
Nobody is going to come back with a half way narrative, a compromised view of global warming for you to sign up to. Nobody is going to say: "Oh I see you won't agree that 5 degrees of warming is too much - let's say 7.5 degrees is the acceptable limit, deal?" Neither is the issue just going to quietly go away if you ignore it for long enough. It's a simple, brutal fact - the warming just keeps getting more and more obvious.
Grow up, get over it, and get on with it.
Otherwise, you can wait for us to get angry enough to sue you for the damage you've caused, take your stuff, and use the funds to make the necessary changes.
How bout them apples?
I wondered when Saudi Arabia decided not to cut production, dooming OPEC to low prices and ticking off the likes of Russia and other producers with marginal economies, if they where not actually working a long term strategy here. Why are they not cutting production?
First, they repress many of the world's trouble makers by dropping prices to 1/3rd their original. Yes, they hurt some emerging producers who are good guys, but these are pretty small. Russia's economy is in free fall due to this and this will greatly diminish their military and economic ability world wide. Other "bad guys" are getting hurt too.
Second, The will succeed in jumpstarting their largest consumer's economy. The USA has suffered under the burden of higher taxes and higher fuel prices (which amounts to a tax on just about everything.) Yea, there will be segments that suffer, energy production companies and those who own the production facilities will be hurt, but over all your average consumer will have more to spend and moving goods will be cheaper as fuel prices drop.
Third, energy production companies who where looking at $100+ oil for as far as the eye could see just 6 months ago, are now looking at $45 or less. Much of their production is now netting below production costs so NOBODY will be drilling new wells and a whole bunch of companies will be hurting. For the most speculative of them they will go bankrupt in fairly short time. This will greatly depress the USA's ability to develop these resources and reduce future supplies and take years to rebuild the industry.
I'm not saying this is what the Saudi's are up to, but the theory does fit the pieces I'm seeing fall together..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I would tell people to enjoy the oil drop while it lasts. This may be long gone by Memorial Day. Why? A few reasons:
1: China is a very thirsty nation. They are also extremely rich and about to embark on infrastructure improvements that make the US's highway structure look like building a McDonalds. So, the demand for oil will be from them. Yes, US demand is in the 1990s levels... but with China guzzling the oil barrels, total demand is a lot higher.
2: Venezuela leaders and others are in Russia today. People forgot about 1972 and 1973 and the US oil embargo, which destroyed the economy until the 1980s. This can easily happen again. OPEC tends to get the prices it wants, and even though fracking might have increased supply, most of the wells done this way are depleted or near depletion, so the "golden" era of this is ending, especially with states like New York banning it wholesale. So, supply will go back down, and OPEC will ensure it stays down.
3: China is building their own canal across the Americas. This way, they can get their oil from Venezuela a lot more easily, completely bypassing any influence from the US.
4: Congress changed. Already, the solar subsidies are on the chopping block, and in January 2017, it won't be a surprise when the next President yanks the solar panels off the White House. Big Oil is now firmly in control of the US again.
5: The Keystone XL pipeline and a repealing of the ban on selling US oil overseas are pretty much guaranteed to happen. This means that any US oil will be trading at world prices.
6: As always, we are always one incident from price spikes. Should someone have a heart attack at a refinery, prices for crude will be back in the triple digits.
7: Alternative energy has grown, but most people's cars are still fueled by gasoline or diesel. If we had more electric cars, they effectively run on solar, wind, coal, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, or many sources. However, internal combustion engined vehicles require fossil fuel to run, and barring a major battery development, will continue to do so.
To, tl;dr... it is nice to have gas prices as low as they are, but they are going to be back to what they were in 2008, if not to $5-$6 a gallon by the summer. Oil prices are controlled by supply and demand, and demand is high due to a thirsty China, and supply is easily removed from the market.
"This is good news," said Duke University scientist Rob Jackson, who was not involved with the study. He called it a "useful and important approach" to monitoring fracking, but he cautioned that the single study doesn't prove that fracking can't pollute, since geology and industry practices vary widely in Pennsylvania and across the nation.
Here's a tip: if you post a URL to a story, read it first.
One is about the IR absorption properties of carbon dioxide. What you choose to *do* about certain undesirable consequences of that piece of physics, that can be about all kinds of things. But global warming itself is just about radiation transport.
gravity is just another form of control! it's the liberals trying to keep us close to 'mother earth'. it's bullshit Gaia-ism if you ask me.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
I doubt that is true. I think the Obama administration and Saudi Arabia are colluding to inflict economic harm on Russia and Iran. That it hurts the US domestic oil industry is simply a nice side effect for Saudi Arabia and a political win for some of Obama's constituency. While it may seriously slow or eliminate fracking in the short term it will also increase consumption so I also doubt there were any environmental considerations here.
The best reason I can imagine for conserving our not infinite petroleum reserve is the future... we don't know what it holds in store for us, and we do not have a viable alternative for petroleum products worked out as yet for every variable.
Imagine our grandchildren with the tech to go universe-hopping, lacking only the fuel.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
eh, cows eat grass. that's green as it gets
We understand way less about economics than about climate change. Predicting what the price of anything will do in the future is really, really hard. A few years ago it seemed like oil prices would keep going up forever. Now they're going down and someone immediately says, "They'll keep going down forever!". But really we have no idea.
But we have a very good idea about what burning oil will do to the climate. If you want to argue for phasing out fossil fuels, do it based on the good arguments: they're destroying the planet. Don't bring in bad arguments based on wild guesses about what might or might not happen to oil prices over the next few years. That just weakens your position.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
In 2000, Sheikh Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:
"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil." - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...
But that 1-2% number of yours is basically the risk of drilling, not fracking. Now if you wan to argue that drilling carries risk, that you can prove easily and I'm not arguing that. I'm saying FRACKING is not causing any increase in risk for an already drilled well. It's a fine point I know, but it's important to make the distinction, because the public doesn't feel that drilling is a huge dangerous health hazard because we've been doing it for more than 100 years and it's not all that dangerous. Fracking doesn't add to the enviromental danger of drilling, it just increases the recoverable supplies from the wells that we drill....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Saudi Arabia is not decreasing production to allow the price to settle at high prices and instead keeping their output strong to depress prices. Here's a reference for you:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/63c7...
Saudi Arabia also has proven reserves to keep this up for a long time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Unofficially (meaning I can't cite my source, and hence the reason I'm posting anonymously), they have over 200 years of known reserves, or enough to provide all the world's oil for about 50 years at current consumption rates.
The important thing about the current price war is that the Saudis have basically given everyone else the finger and decided that they're going to corner the market as long as they can (or, for the more conspiratorial among us, the US asked them to do it to crush Putin). They can produce it at lower prices than anyone else. More power to them if they take advantage of that. Capitalism at its finest, if you ask me!
It's a little of everything, but I really don't think there's that much subterfuge in it. The US and Canada (and some others) have massively increased oil supply through harnessing shale oil deposits. Saudi Arabia isn't just going to pump less oil out of the ground because we are pumping more. They have bills and lifestyles to maintain so they're going to keep their production levels up. If everyone has combined to increase supply, prices will go down. The prices will equalize at a level that shuts down enough of the expensive wells to bring supply down to match demand. If that point shuts down a lot of US shale oil production in favor of the Saudis, I'm sure they are fine with that. If that point inflicts economic harm on Iran and Russia I'm sure the US is fine with that.
I'm sure the Saudis also realize that they need to sell their oil now not in the future. Of all the possibilities for the future, the one they will like the least is the one where oil is completely replaced by other sources of energy. If you are looking at a risk of selling oil for $0 in the future, selling it for any profitable amount today is preferable.
in a world where a producer sees the end of its market on the horizon, then every barrel sold at a profit is more valuable than a barrel that will never be sold. Current Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi had this to say about production cuts in late December: "it is not in the interest of OPEC to cut their production whatever the price is," adding that even if prices fell to $20 "it is irrelevant." Implied, if not explicitly stated, is that Saudi Arabia wants its oil out of the ground, regardless of how thin its profit margin per barrel becomes. - http://www.nasdaq.com/article/...
CO2 increases do raise temps. Methane increases do the same. Perhaps not buy a huge amount but at least you agree they do have effect. Water vapor is largely driven by temperature. So the small increase of CO2/methane causes increase in water vapor concentrations....Which causes a large increase as you so deftly note. Now that increase causes more increase. It's called a feedback loop for a reason.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
now there's a political FOX cartoon for you. All 'bad' things in a venn diagram that's a circle, with Obama in the middle!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Actually there won't BE any fuel taxes. As in no gasoline fuel used. The 'gas tax' is dying and needs too. Paying based on your annual mileage x vehicle type needs to be the new metric for funding roads. Even before we get off gas, cars are more and more efficient, reducing the amount of gas used per mile driven. The cost of maintaining the roads is FAR exceeded by the cost of not doing so. When the roads start breaking down, the delivery trucks need that much more maintenance and now everything costs more to deliver. Regular maintenance spending is always cheaper.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Who has more money. Al Gore or the Koch Brothers? And yet the Koch Brothers can't seem to buy even 4% of scientists? If you're claiming scientists are 'bought', then why exactly aren't they singing the tune of the highest bidders?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Gravity is made up. What holds everything down on planet earth is suction. The earth sucks.
I guess the summary is "nobody can afford oil anymore, it's getting too cheap and there is too much of it around"!
Shale is fracking. It's how they are extracting said oil, by breaking the shale with injection wells. It's used for both gas and oil.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
That is a good point however, consider the following:
- Tight oil fields (ie, the Baaken) need many more wells drilled than 'conventional' oil. Each well increases the risk of bore failure.
- The states where much of the frakking is currently happening (remember we've been frakking stuff for 50 years or so) have a history of poor regulatory supervision of the process. Texas and Louisiana have been bitten bad in the past and have tightened up drilling regulations such that they have very few bad wellbores. The other states, not so much. Why those states didn't just borrow the time tested regulations is an interesting question.
So, you're point that the actually hydraulic fracturing of a given well is unlikely to cause aquifer damage is a good one. It's a bit pedantic since most people consider the entire process as 'frakking'. It's pretty clear that frakking in tight oil plays does increase the risk for aquifer damage. Again, it's really annoying that the bad actors screw things up for everybody. In a way, there are parallels to nuclear power. If done correctly risks are low and manageable. However, doing things correctly yields an economic penalty. Some folks will try to take advantage of that, usually for minimal short term gain. So the entire industry gets pilloried.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The Koch brothers don't need to buy scientists - they bought climate denying politicians. The Republicans then put climate deniers in every environment and science role (and if you don't believe me, look it up yourself - just recently they added anti-science/climate denier Ted Cruz to head NASA and have had a climate denier running the EPA since late last year). I'm not saying jump two feet into cutting all emissions like some nuts on the left, but just give science an effing chance and see if it affects anything. These guys just outright deny it is and can happen.
Problem is the NVAP program hasnt shown an increase in water vapour.
The slight warming we are experiencing seems to be only from climate sensitivity to CO2 and that sensitivity is on the low side of the models, very very low.
3) And for the good of humanity you want the price to be HIGH Z
Well someone sure is ignoring history!!
Because the cheaper energy of any form has been cheap, the better lives people led. That includes environmentally...
With more power you have more education, more industry, more jobs, more success period. With all that comes more leisure time which means more free time to devote to a healthy Earth.
If you want the best for "humanity" you want cheap energy - from any source.
Renewables will come along, but you can increase viability only so quickly. Until then don't screw people over my artificially limiting their access to energy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So arguing that there is no global warming, that the global warming has stopped, that it is not man-made or that it is a non-issue, because it will actually benefit us, is seen as some way of defending Freedom[tm], and many libertarian leaning people and a lot of conservative ones feel a mission to cast doubt on solid science, because defending Freedom is always good work, right? And because the science itself is quite solid (we can actually measure the heat trapping properties of different levels of the components in the atmosphere, and we have a good way to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide and methane we release in the atmosphere), the doubt is cast either on the researchers (they are accused to have an agenda, they are called liars, they are suspected to conspire against us all...), or on the immediate conclusions. Models are called misleading, every new discovery how to more correctly assess an effect gets hailed as proof that the evil climate scientists are wrong again etc.pp..
Try to separate the science and the politics! And yes, denying the science on whatever level is at first an attempt to politice the science.
10 years ago there were no Tesla on the road, now there are a few 1000. N*1000/0 = infinitely more Tesla
I'm amazed that nobody here has picked you up on this (indeterminately more Teslas, not infinite) - or maybe the Slashdot crowd are insensate to mathematical trolling.
This is why I've been pushing to argue in favor of reducing fossil fuel use not from an environmental point of view, but from an economic one. People can bury their heads in the sand when it comes to science, but people always listen when money is involved.
Even though the US imports about a third of our petroleum, that's still equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars per year leaving our economy. If we transition to renewable energies, that money stays around a bit longer.
Renewable energies might have a larger up-front capital cost (but not by much, and it's getting better every day), but the long term costs are overwhelmingly favorable.
With the current crash in oil prices it should be clear that our economy is in the hands of foreign interests. We are hostages to international petroleum markets. Let's develop domestic sources to free ourselves from foreign influence. Remember: There's no reason why oil couldn't have been this cheap all along, and the price only went down right when we were posed to start reducing imports in favor of domestic natural gas production. We're being played!
(Oh, and if we happen to mitigate the environmental damage we're doing in the process and avoid global catastrophe, I guess that'll be a bonus...)
=Smidge=
The summary, most of the article and most of the posts here are completely missing the point.
The oil, coal and natural gas need to stay in the ground, regardless of what we are paying for it, $50, $150 per barrel, people still pay for it.
Is civilisation going to end when we stop using fossil fuels? Of course not.
Far better article about global warming:Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Perhaps you didn't read the study that the pacific has been absorbing the energy causing the seeming 'hiatus' in rising temps. linky So it's quite plausible that the pacific has been redistributing the heat lower into the ocean columns. Eventually though it stops being able to do that and the atmospheric heating continues...now with a warmer ocean to boot.
It's a complex system and we don't know everything but we continue to study and learn. As opposed to your ilk who just say 'nope, no problems' with no evidence to explain the workings of the system.
Much like claiming a snow storm means the climate isn't warming. It IS warming and has been for decades but because of a single blip in the trend you're ready to throw out decades of factual solid data on temps.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people