Shell stops Arctic activity after 'disappointing' tests

This is 100% not true. Shell's Arctic response plan was approved by various regulatory agencies and was deemed adequate. In situ burning, dispersants, mechanical recovery.

Note that 10,000 people were on the ground cleaning up Valdez and that sort of disaster is as easily mitigated as a spill from a well (can't really cap a ship). There's no reason to believe Shell couldn't mobilize as many or more.

(warning, pdf download) http://www.shell.us/about-us/projects-and-locations/shell-in...

I couldn't find a link to the full plan but it's on the internet somewhere.

It should be noted, from the dates of these policy papers, that they are only a year old.

Exactly. Shell isn't at all worried about their reputation. They find Greenpeace amusing more than anything. Arctic oil is expensive and at current prices just isn't profitable.

Watch to see if they keep the drilling licenses or sell them off to another play with more cash like ExxonMobil.

Interesting, do you have a source for more information? (not meant to be snarky, genuinely interested)

Even granting the first sentence, the second doesn't follow. Some sources of oil are cheaper or easier to get to than others; you could put a 100% enforceable ban on oil burning over some limit X, and it would still make sense to explore for oil.

Oil is useful stuff, it is a waste to burn it. We will be able to make plastics for a lot longer if we can generate energy from something else.

> ...if we burn all the oil we've already found...

Plastics and inorganic fertilizers are two of the things we can make with oil. Both of these things are pretty damn important.

I suspect that -one day- burning so much of our oil supply just to produce electricity and locomotion will be regarded as a rather poor decision.

~85% of the US's energy usage comes from fossil fuels [1]. Despite the unfortunate reality of anthropogenic climate change, the really key thing to realize is that transitions to alternate forms of energy take decades because the scale of such transitions is absolutely enormous; these changes take longer and longer with every major transition, i.e. wood to coal, or coal to oil; oil to whatever's next could take a century [2]. The earth has about 1300 billion barrels of 'proven' oil reserves[3] which at current consumption rates of ~100 million barrels per day [4] gives us about 36 years of oil left. And that assumes that, despite rapid increases in population size and economic development, that consumption won't change.

36 years isn't very long to develop the new energy technology, test it sufficiently, and build the infrastructure. Oil is the hardest to replace of all of our energy sources because it has the highest energy density and is therefore integral to transportation. Replacing coal with solar + nuclear would be a better option because both are based on stationary power plants instead of car engines and jet turbines. But in reality, if oil gets expensive now, we'll just start burning more coal because the pieces are already in place.

Like it or not (I definitely do not like it), we are a society very reliant upon fossil fuels, and if fossil fuel accessibility is restricted substantially (i.e. by completely stopping oil exploration) there will be considerable destabilization of society, which will do two particularly nasty things: 1) Harm the poor disproportionately, by making it difficult or impossible for the poor in developed nations to heat their houses and drive to work and school, and raising the cost of food substantially; and by completely stopping if not reversing the economic development of the rest of the world, keeping billions in poverty. 2) Wreak tremendous havoc on the environment, as the forests are cut down to provide wood for heating and cooking, and the fisheries and wild animal stock is razed due to high food prices.

There are no great solutions to the problem, but there are some that are much better than the current status quo of doing nothing, or the opposite end-member solution of enforcing an otherwise unlikely peak oil catastrophe by stopping exploration. Taxing carbon and using the proceeds to fund new energy technology as well as ramping up current alternative energy production both domestically and in India and Africa, and implementing more efficient transportation, heating and electricity generation could go a long way.

[1] 2012 levels, from Energy Revolution by Mara Prentiss [2] Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate by Vaclav Smil [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves [4] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/global_oil.cfm

While fracking has become more popular in the last few years, the big reason for low oil prices at the moment is the Saudis. They saw $billions in investments in the various drilling, etc efforts and decided to flood the market to kill their competition and sacrifice profits now to keep their dominance in the long run.

From a purely economic perspective, it's a good move on their part.