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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.
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.
This dangerous trend can and will be stopped: We will use a combination of tariffs, executive orders and obscure WWII-era federal statutes to nationalize the energy sector and stamp out this "change" nonsense, ensuring that fossil fuel jobs in key voting districts will endure for decades to come!
The sane thing to do is to provide aid to modernize these countries.
You can't modernize an old mindset of tribal warfare with aid.
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 ?
The problem is volatility. These things don't happen in nice, smooth supply/demand curves. Even a 2% drop in demand would wreak havoc on the market... as some suppliers go offline (or bankrupt) the price spikes again, and you get a yoyo effect that could spiral out of control. The "light tight" oil coming out of these fracking plays is not a drop-in replacement for West Texas crude, it's a different product with very different economics -- with EROEI in the single digits, and most producers leveraged to the gills, not covering much more than their operating costs, even at $60/bbl. The whole business is a house of cards.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
There's still a lot of cheap oil with low extraction cost, but the market price of oil is determined by the most expensive barrel, not the average. As demand drops just a little bit, these expensive barrels are taken out of the equation, and price will drop quickly.