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'Carbon Bubble' Could Spark Global Financial Crisis, Study Warns (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The existence of a "carbon bubble" -- assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because, in the medium and long-term, the world will have to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- has long been proposed by academics, activists and investors. The new study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that a sharp slump in the value of fossil fuels would cause this bubble to burst, and posits that such a slump is likely before 2035 based on current patterns of energy use. Crucially, the findings suggest that a rapid decline in fossil fuel demand is no longer dependent on stronger policies and actions from governments around the world. Instead, the authors' detailed simulations found the demand drop would take place even if major nations undertake no new climate policies, or reverse some previous commitments. That is because advances in technologies for energy efficiency and renewable power, and the accompanying drop in their price, have made low-carbon energy much more economically and technically attractive.
That's just a guess.
For many of you, this slump will happen right before you retire, crushing your savings and forcing you to stay in the working world, with now-shittier pay and even fewer job prospects.
But you are the lucky ones.
For me, it will happen just a few years after I have already retired, let my skills rust and myself age to the point of being unemployable....now with no passive income to speak of and no job prospects at all. And the costly medical issues that come with age.
The world is an unkind place.
I don't think it's a joke, really. There's been no lack of demand for oil, and it's doubtful that this is going to change any time soon. Peak oil may well hit us first.
It seems as though our vaunted financial indicators must be...a trifle off...in some way if a combination of cheaper energy efficiency measures and increase in availability of energy sources cheaper than the current low cost options would have negative effects on the economy.
How do you do that? The cost of a fair amount of energy(and often a lot of petrochemicals that will presumably be cheaper if less demand for using them as fuel means lower cost for purchasing them as feedstocks) is baked into pretty much every good and service imaginable. What sort of ghastly mistake does it take to turn "basically everything has become cheaper to produce" into a financial crisis?
if you want to see the effects of dropping oil prices look at Venezuela. Yeah, some of those wounds were self inflicted, but the big issue was the sudden drop in oil prices pulling the rug out from under them (plus a drought shutting down their hydro electric dam, folks forget how small they are, that was a big deal).
Now, imagine what's gonna happen when the price of oil gets low enough that the middle eastern countries can't afford to keep up their militaries and their social welfare programs. Don't forget that most of these countries are crazy religious and several of them have big arms and nukes.
The sane thing to do is to provide aid to modernize these countries. Instead we've been putting sanctions on a lot of these countries. We're doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing, and it's exactly what we've always done as a species. I don't have an answer because it comes down to conniving assholes taking advantage of large groups of people who aren't very bright, and I don't have an answer for that.
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You expect a collapse in energy prices and the massive availability of cheap energy to negatively effect industrial economies ?
So that would be like the economic disasters that came about when people started burning coal for steam power or oil for the internal combustion engine, And electrification destroyed the worlds economy ?
Oil reserves are increasingly hard to extract, so cheaper is not necessarily likely, even if demand falls. In fact if demand falls, then a lot of extraction becomes uneconomic, and production can fall off a cliff. You could end up with lots of ICE cars, but nothing much to power them with.
And that won't make fuel at the pump that much cheaper, it has to be processed and transported, and pump stations will have far fewer customers, making operating a network of stations more expensive per customer.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, the oil age won't end because we run out of oil.
Who remembers being told we are heading into a new ice age?
Sigh. In the 1970s, some people in the media claimed that there would be an ice age; scientists were in fact already talking about global warming https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm.
Why do we pay attention to this crap. It's just like a new fad diet.
Because this "crap" happens to be pretty accurate and pretty concerning. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/1732/, and look at changing sea ice levels http://nsidc.org/sites/nsidc.org/files/images/cryosphere/sotc/arctic-antarctic-anomaly-trend-1978-2017.png http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html.
I find this truly interesting and I have noted it as well. It speaks to the hypocrisy of most of the people in the world I guess. All the blustering aside, the ACTUAL policies of the two main parties in the US political system are quite similar. It was Mrs. Clinton who called the TPP the "Gold Standard" for trade treaties even though it would decimate the environment throughout a good chunk of the world and many, many more US jobs. Mr. Obama pushed for expansion of that abomination, The Patriot Act. Mr. GW Bush pushed and got the patriot act. Mr. Clinton got the first anti-terrorism laws in the 90s, which were Patriot lite. Unfortunately, because the peons believe the politicians that they support are on their side, when really they aren't as the little people are merely proles, they support them.
Solar isn't being adopted on islands because it is ridiculously cheap, it's because fuel and electricity on islands is ridiculously expensive.
love is just extroverted narcissism