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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sufficiently versed to have this opinion probably, but why are we building pipelines all over the place? Isn't oil a dinosaur (heh heh) at this point? I mean, no, obviously the world runs on it, but I expect to in my lifetime see insane leaps in solar tech and rollout, huge jumps in the percentages of electric cars on the roads, driverless cars reconfigure if and how people buy cars, and so on.

Is the US really growing its oil use so much we need two or three new pipelines?

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It's not use that has changed. It's production.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

This pipeline removes 7 unit trains a day from the rails through Minnesota to Illinois, the bakken makes about a million+/- bbls a day, and will for quite some time.

The solution seems to be to drive the price of oil up then, no?

Higher oil prices are good for the Bakken. It's not economically feasible to get at that oil at lower prices, which is one possible reason for the recent over production from the Middle East. Drive the price down low enough and the companies working in the Bakken fold, send their workers home, and it takes a long time to build back up.

But higher oil prices do drive down the use of oil in general.

Oil has highly inelastic demand in the short term. People need to drive to work. Goods need to be transported either by train, ship, or truck. Planes are still jam packed with people.

In the long term high oil prices will modify demand because people will start buying more efficient vehicles. You can see this happening in the decade starting in 2001 because prices spiked and stayed above $3/gal for the entire decade and fuel efficiency rose to match it.

Not to forget one of the most "insidious" uses/dependencies of oil: food production in general and agriculture in particular. No oil, means, as far as I know, without radical change, less (as in not enough) and (much) more expensive food. That's even before one considers transport etc.

I really wonder why farmers don't run their equipment on biodiesel or bioethanol.

(Actually, the answer is bloody obvious. Admittedly somewhat off-topic, too.)

AFAIK there's been some success in Germany with being able to combine a big enough crop devoted to biodisel along side a meaningfully size crop for food - but oil, especially subsidized oil, is really cheap energy.

But there was recently a big scare connected to farmers taking subsidies to produce biodisel - and biodiisel production out-competing food production and/or leading to hike in food prices... so yeah. If you have X square meters in which to grow food, you can't readily use some large percentage of that for "growing" biodiesel, without cutting into your food grow area.

I'm sure there are certain biomass that will work as both, but it's not trivial to "just use biodisel".

Higher oil prices also drive up the price of food around the world. In a more well off economies maybe higher oil prices cause people drive a little less. In lower end economies it just means more starvation and suffering. Without a suitable replacement, artificially driving up the global price of oil is literally killing and maiming (through malnutrition) people.

Sophie's choice: people are either going to die from climate change, or from policies making oil more expensive to consume to slow climate change.

The question is as old as time: who is going to decide which cohort dies. And the answer is the entirety with the most might/force/influence, as always (unfortunately).

The IPCC says nearly all predicted deaths will happen in the future. In a future where by all current data, the world will be a richer more capable place. The future deats are mere guestimations as only the extreme limits of hubris would attempt to accurately predict the capabilities of people 50 or 100 years from now.

Whereas the deaths from higher food prices are here and now. You could easily get on a plane and meet the people condemned to die from arbitrarily higher energy prices.

> In a future where by all current data, the world will be a richer more capable place.

But climate change is already too far in progress to wait for a future where we're more capable. We're already capable enough, just need to funnel money to the right places.

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