Hacker News Reader

Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

There's a great report from the UK that analyzes the losses of stranded fossil assets if we're to hit our climate change goals. It says that in order to cap at 2C warming we can only pull up 1/4 of our existing proven reserves, and only 1/3 to cap at 3C. That means stranding over 2/3rds of our fossil assets. Also, the situation heavily favors producers who have cheap assets, which are mostly sovereign producers in the middle east. The private producers like Shell end up having to strand way more than 2/3rds because the get pushed out due to low prices.

http://www.carbontracker.org/report/carbon-bubble/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble

View on HN

Well, you have to also keep in mind that a lot of those reserves were proven at an oil price of >$100/barrel. I don't remember offhand the numbers for what percentage of proven reserves are commercially viable today, but I spoke to someone in Shell a few weeks ago about North Sea developments. He said that in unconventional plays, basically only polymer-EOR is profitable at current price levels, while ultra-deep fields, CO2-based EOR and arctic fields are generally all unprofitable. My guess is the same goes for Gulf of Mexico ultra-deep fields, as well as Brazilian pre-salt.

I also know that several of the small brownfields in the North Sea are being operated now at a loss, because that costs less than plugging and abandonment.

So it's perhaps not that far fetched to think that 2/3rds of current proven reserves will not be developed if the current economic situation persists.

Yep, that's the idea. Do you happen to know what price we'd need to stay under to price out 2/3rds of assets? $40? $30?

A carbon tax would really help here to start driving down demand more to try and drive down the price more.

> It says that in order to cap at 2C warming we can only pull up 1/4 of our existing proven reserves, and only 1/3 to cap at 3C.

This is assuming that the extracted oil is burned, though, right? If a new industry emerges making, say, huge plastic spaceships, then it may still be profitable to extract all the oil we can get.

Only about 7% of oil isn't burned. So you'd have to grow the plastics, asphalt, etc. industries by 10x to make up for the 2/3rd stranded assets. That's a lot of plastic spaceships and parking lots.

http://energy.gov/articles/hows-and-whys-replacing-whole-bar...

And parking lots are going to take a huge hit regardless, with some mix of population decline in first world countries (less cars overall), self driving cars (again, less cars), and populations continuing to migrate to major population centers (mass transit > cars).

More parking lots but not roads? An I missing something?

It's not like we have to use all the oil in the planet this century. Saving oil for making plastics and other useful products makes sense.

Interesting question, is it better to mine it now and store it, or tear down the industry and rebuild it if we come to need it again in the future?

I once read an article explaining that storing oil is definitely not easy. IIRC, it was super toxic, abrasive, could easily be set on fire, and of course, super valuable => you need almost a bunker to store it...

Oil is already a boom/bust business. Leaving oil and in the geological formations where it sits is probably the best way to store it.

I think Tim Flannery (though probably not the first or only one to) proposed the benefits of retaining a huge volume or oil & coal in case we ever need to thoughtfully kick-start a greenhouse effect.

There are more potent and shorter term greenhouse gases we could produce for that purpose.

Even oil that isn't burned right away is usually burned later in some waste processing plant.

And how much fossil fuel would those huge plastic spaceships burn, especially if they were reusable?

And since this is not going to happen, and carbon sequestration takes more energy than we gain from the remaining oil, an articifial volcanic winter is probably going to be the only way out. Main problem: Kiss complex oceanic life goodbye - 2C warming will already be enough to pretty much kill all the coral reefs. Getting a cooling effect but with a continuously increasing ocean acidity will be devastating.

Is there a chance that evolution will mitigate the rising temperatures and ocean acidity? Or are there perhaps levels those things that are fundamentally negative to life in general? Or is evolution too slow or too unpredictable to come out as a anything other than a net negative for humans?

With very high certainty (with some slight chance that Earth becomes the next Venus and evolution here ends for good).

Keep in mind though that a mass extinction is part of the process of accelerating evolution. You don't get a quick adaptation without a strong selection process.

Edit: By 'slight chance' I mean very much near zero btw. However I'm skeptic enough of climate models to know that they aren't good enough to include all the domino effects we've never seen. The Permiam-Triassic boundary saw tremendous forest fires along with abrupt methane release, and that didn't include a species actively releasing enormous amounts of fossilised carbon. I'd imagine that if a few worst case scenarios came together - finding more fossil fuel sources, burning up all of it and causing unstoppable forest fires in all large remaining forests, it could happen.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runaw...

It depends on whether there already exist creatures that can survive the rising temperatures and coming acidity _together with whatever they eat_.

Evolution will solve it eventually. The problem is the timescale. It's a common argument that climate change isn't a problem because the Earth has been even warmer in the past. That's true, but misses the point. The problem isn't merely that the climate is warming, but that it's warming extremely quickly. Nature adjusts, but nature takes a long time to do it. If the temperature goes up by 4°C in a century, that's far too fast.

On the specific question of evolution, major changes happen on a timescale of thousands if not millions of years. For example, despite huge changes in our environment, humans today are basically the same as they were tens of thousands of years ago.

Earth will probably return to something like an equilibrium, both in terms of climate and in terms of wildlife, in a million years or less. But that doesn't do us any good when the threat to our civilization, from climate change and ecosystem collapse, is in the next century or two.

> Kiss complex oceanic life goodbye - 2C warming will already be enough to pretty much kill all the coral reefs.

If only there were some process by which living populations could "adapt" to a changing environment.

You couldn't get rid of complex oceanic life if you tried, no matter what you tried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_ev...

I know that I was vague with using the word 'complex', but 96% of all marine species, with only small, 'squishy' (low calcium carbonate content in bodies) species surviving, is enough for me.

It's also interesting to look at what probably caused that particular, so far most devastating extinction event.

But you might get rid of all the species that human beings eat.

If you talk in the time scales of millions of years, yes. Otherwise it is not true. Global warming has the potential to eradicate most marine life as we know it. And once it is gone, it is gone for all the time scales relevant for humanity. And we do not know how far the ecological impact would be. Just killing the coral reefs would be a tragedy, but if we are unlucky, this triggers enough eco systems to collapse that also our direct survival is endangered.

1. Through over-fishing, exploitation and pollution the higher marine animal populations collapse. Coral reefs disappear.

2. After several generations nobody alive has ever seen a coral reef, a whale or dolphin. Most of the 'attractive' marine environments are heavily compromised so nobody is interested in preserving the marine environment anymore as it's mostly gone already.

3. Humans develop a global stable civilization.

4. After a million years or so the remaining marine habitats and life forms have heavily adapted to the new environment. Few to no higher animals remain that resemble their 'natural' forms. Humanity comes to regard these as vermine.

Project the above over another couple of billions of years.

Nature will be fine, she's been through worse. It's humans who are in for a rough time.

From some of the pentagon reports, it sounds like major wars over food and migration start breaking out at 2.5-3C, if not sooner. At 3-4C it's likely to no longer be confined to developing nations.

http://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/612710

Both nature and humans will be in for a rough time, and both will survive, but not unscathed. Coral reefs and many other vulnerable ecosystems will get seriously damaged. Something will eventually take its place, but in the mean time, a lot of species will be going extinct.

That may not be quite as pressing an issue for us as war and famine, but it's not the same thing as "fine".

There are only really two scenarios in which nature will be fine. Humans wipe themselves out, or humans build a long term (billions of years) sustainable civilization that maintains extensive nature reserves well stocked with viable and sustainable populations of wildlife with no interruptions or reserve management screw ups for the rest of the life of the solar system.

Most of the "fossil assets" are in the form of coal. The good news is that most coal is burned in fixed power plants which can readily be substituted by other electricity sources, and that is economical today. Oil is a problem too, but a smaller one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com