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Also contributing probably is the rising risk that if you don't pump that oil as fast as possible and sell it now, you might never be able to sell it. This is weighing on the Saudi Aramco IPO. Although probably not as much as the general opaque and untrustworthy reports from the Saudis as to how much oil they have left.

We used to worry about peak oil, where a supply crunch would cause the price to skyrocket. Now it's clear it will end in a whimper with demand just trailing off until only the very cheapest producers are still in the market. Too bad Canada, Brazil.

It's a good thing to be clear, and can't happen fast enough.

To be fair, I think the "peak oil scare" was good. That's when we all started to focus and take renewables seriously. I find it funny that OPEC never learned from its mistake from the 70s when there was the oil shortage and fuel efficiency became a thing. To be aware, fuel efficiency before then was never worth mentioning in a car sale. Yes, it never became too big because the shortage ended, but it at least got started.

Without the peak oil scare, we wouldn't be "this" far, I think. Humans need a burning fire under their ass to actually do something.

Promise you this though. Don't think big oil will be down and out. They're going to collect all the cold hard cash they can this next few years. Then, they're going to strangle the commodities needed for renewables. They'll start buying rare earth mining rights, processing plants, manufacturing companies and all. Making sure they make the biggest dollar from the beginning of the energy food chain to the consumer's doorstep. If they can't make money from oil, both God and I as their witness, they'll make their money from lithium and battery manufacturing. To think they're a bunch of mustache twirling dummies is the biggest folly people have.

> they'll make their money from lithium and battery manufacturing

This isn't much of a problem though I think? It would be a problem if they bought mining rights then refused to mine causing shortages of raw materials needed for renewable tech.

As a capitalist, I want to own all the lithium mining rights in the world. I dictate the price and flow when I seem fit. Like De Beers in blood diamonds... cough, sorry, "ethically sourced diamonds".

As a consumer, I want many, many capitalists owning different lithium mining rights in the world. They fight each other to lower the price and be competitive. Then find cheaper and cheaper ways to obtain lithium or even figure out better alternatives.

I am a capitalist. But I'm also not a total fucking monster. Oil companies don't play massive competitive games. They like working together. So no. I don't want them to have a hand in the future.

By the way, research lithium mining. A lot of big media have reported on it. It's fucked up and pretty much a modern day humanitarian/slave crisis.

Lithium is easily sustainable to mine and there are wildly ample amounts of reserves in the US. Almost all negative articles about vehicle electrification are hit pieces that intentionally conflate lithium and rare earth materials like Cobalt.

I agree with you, but Cobalt is not a rare earth material.

And just to reiterate: lithium is abundant, widely distributed, and cobalt isn't required for batteries (LiFePO4 is a common chemistry, uses no cobalt, and has very long cycle life... good especially for grid applications).

> To be fair, I think the "peak oil scare" was good. That's when we all started to focus and take renewables seriously. I

No not really. It made me focus on looking into the 'peak oil' claims and I then realized that was major nonsense and people who proclaim it should not be taken seriously and are instantly discredited in anything they say.

Peak oil was a major distraction about the actual issues that should have been talked about.

I remember listening to a Michael Moore book in 00s where he talked about peak oil and had a funny story about a grandparent telling kids what it was like to have petroleum products like plastic and whatnot. He listed all the things made with oil that would disappear. I thought that was a bit crazy so did some research on the topic and realized that he was either full of horse apples, or stupid, or being deceitful, or some mix.

Since then, I’ve been curious about peak oil claims and they all seemed really wrong headed.

The best I can think is that they were trying to trick people into using renewables. But I think tricking people is short sighted because when the trick wears off, I don’t trust the person again.

I don't think that's fair. Our methods of determining oil reserves and our technology to extract oil from previously un-economic raw materials (shale oil, tar sands, heavy crude) have improved dramatically, which is the main reason for the glut of oil that we see today.

Good point. I think the challenge is trying to figure out what is BS put out by the oil companies (that never showed peak oil) vs BS put out by other people (that I guess inaccurately failed to include technology improvements in their forecasts).

I think the part that is fair is the belief that we would run out of oil to the point that we wouldn’t be able to make plastics. That’s just me not taking into account of the supply demand curve where plastics would be able to use oil even if we were not able to affordable fuel cars.

That what brought the price down. But there are huge known fields in the Golf and other places that have major potential, but those are rationed by a cartel.

"The house is burning! The house is burning!" A child laughs.

Parents take the child out of the house quickly in fear. After a moment a plane crashes into the house, obliterating it.

While yes, the child was full of shit. It still led to something marginally good. Maybe the parents should have left him in the house because he's a little shit. That might make the situation better. But that's an ethics question I don't feel like exploring.

Peak oil might have been a false flag scare, true. I'm not going to argue with you on that. Fuck it, I'm going to agree with you. It was a total bullshit scare! But it was a scare that led to a big push in getting away from fossil fuels. So still, it was a good thing. Ends justify the means.

The problem with this is when a group cries wolf, are the people going to continue to listen? Eventually, Machiavellian tactics turn your credibility to mud. You end up in a place where folks don't believe anything a group says. Then you're stuck shaking your fist at "the stupid general" public when your organization's tactics are largely to blame. This is where both sides of the environmental discussion have ended up and why the issue is so polarized (in part).

Exactly. We've hit "the point of no return" in regards to climate change at least twice in the past 10 years and depending on who you ask, we're projected to hit another "point of no return" in 2024 if we don't change our ways. Look up the early climate change movements and there have been people predicting the imminent death of the earth for the last 70 years.

So, yeah, I don't blame people when they eat their plastic wrapped burger in their F150 while giving up any efforts to "save the world".

>Peak oil might have been a false flag scare

Oil is a limited resource, the value of its extraction is differentiable, it started at 0, and will finish at 0, following Rolle's theorem, it has a maximum, the peak oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolle%27s_theorem

> Oil is a limited resource

So oil is like every other resource, good to know.

> It was a total bullshit scare! But it was a scare that led to a big push in getting away from fossil fuels. So still, it was a good thing. Ends justify the means.

When this kind of thinking is common, though, you lose the ability to engage at all with people who might not believe that "getting away from fossil fuels" is valuable as an end in itself.[1]

Is it valuable for other reasons? Certainly not any reasons that might come out of your mouth.

[1] Which, frankly, should be everyone. What kind of terminal goal is that?

I'm not saying it's right.

I'm saying it's effective.

If you say the right thing but people still do the wrong thing... who cares?

If you say the wrong thing, but people do the right thing, is that bad?

If you say the wrong thing, and people call you on it, and you demonize them and call up the mobs against them for it, then yes, it's bad.

The "ends justify the means" mentality has been the cause of many (most?) atrocities in history because it takes the assumption that one side just knows what's right without being able to recognize our own fallibility

Is it effective? I think there’s some confounding factors involved. For all we know the narrative made it worse and kept us on oil longer because companies tried to pump faster and drove prices down.

The notion of crude oil becoming a stranded asset seems a little silly. It will be many decades before the transportation infrastructure transitions off fossil fuels. And even then there will be demand for oil as a feed stock for chemical manufacturing (plastics, fertilizers, etc). (I'm not claiming that this is a good thing, it's just the economic reality.)

I can't remember where I saw the numbers and I'm pretty sure I'm off a bit. But I think only half of all crude oil gets distilled into "fuel". The rest ends up as plastics and other chemicals, as you mention. I just remember it's a very significant of non-fuel oil use is out there. A quick google search, I can't find the chart I saw. Maybe someone can chime in better on that?

Edit: Listen to Retric's comment below, not me on my stats

Worldwide, only 1/4 of oil is used for industry.

46% of oil is turned into gas. However, include diesel, aviation, plus boat fuels and transportation adds up to 69% of oil used.

Home heating is 3%, and electricity is 1%.

Personal transport going close to 100% electric is going to take a long time, but combine all electric vehicles with plug in hybrids and demand may start to drop within 10 years. Especially if bio fuel production remains steady, the total demand for oil could actually start to fall significantly within ~15 years.

Remove oil as an energy source and industry would still keep 1/4 of current demand. So, oil is not going to become stranded, but that’s still going to crush any company or country depending on current profits.

We have a LOT of oil in the ground. If most of it doesn't get stranded we're in for much, much worse problems.

I don't understand why people say oil is useful for plastics and such as though that was fundamentally different from its use as fuel. In either case, the reason we use it is because it is a pre-existing store of energy. If you have an energy source, then you can make oil, plastics, and whatever else you want. I have, or had, a mug from a former employer that was made out of plant-based plastic. It appeared no different from any other.

Sure synthetic hydrocarbons will eventually take over for those purposes. But we don't have anywhere near enough renewable energy to make it economically viable today. It will take decades to build the necessary infrastructure.

I think the peak in "peak oil" is a very wide peak with a lot of noise in it. That makes it easy for certain people to make-believe it's not going to happen. But it is... we just might not be able to predict which decade with certainty.

Perhaps this is a kind of an intelligence test for human civilization. Can we stop the global guzzling of petroleum resources before there's a profound ecological and economic shock? I think not.

There's no "free-refill" of oil unless we all go extinct, get covered by sediment for a million years before we're liquified to petroleum.

Look, I'm just about a complete package when it comes to being an asshole. My history on HN is more than enough to prove that.

But, I don't' think humans are that useless to where they're going to fail in fixing this. This can be reversed and we're in the beginning stages. The hole in the ozone layer was deemed doomed and without repair. NASA has it in track on being fully recovered in around 2060 since we stopped using shit aerosols in the 90s.

I think Musk is a complete and utter cunt, but I also recognize the good he's done for electronic cars. Now, all the big players are releasing real electric cars. Hell, VW is doing so to fix their PR image after the diesel scandal. This is good. Still will take time, but you can't have a critical mass breaking point without a slow beginning. A point will be reached (when, I'm not smart enough to answer) and fossil fuel cars will look like a home phone compared to cell phones. If you're old enough, you'll remember that cell phones were "secondary" phones. Then, in a flash, people realized "Oh, we all stopped paying for landlines". And few people have landlines anymore.

The moment Dodge/Ford/GM come out with an EV that has the same feel and balls as a muscle car, that's my personal breaking point. Right now it's all focused on the luxury, feather, Italian aesthetics feel. Fuck that dumbass nonsense. Give me a mean and angry electric vehicle. Or an ultra long range EV Jeep. That'd be cool.

> The moment Dodge/Ford/GM come out with an EV that has the same feel and balls as a muscle car, that's my personal breaking point. Right now it's all focused on the luxury, feather, Italian aesthetics feel.

There's nothing stopping them from doing so from a technology perspective (and heck, the Dodge Charger has an ideal name for a EV remake). It's just that they don't believe there is a market today for EVs among people with your tastes. Add to that the fact that margins on muscle cars are probably huge vs an equivalently specced EV, because muscle cars are decades old technology (big V6-V8 engine) repackaged.

I've had people with similar tastes tell me that the sound and vibration of a gasoline/petrol engine in a ICE car is something they don't want to give up. They like the uneven jerky feel of switching gears, even if they are accelerating more slowly overall. When I point out that both of these things could be simulated relatively easily in an EV, they often pivot to cultural nostalgia and "authenticity" of a petroleum burning engine.

Depending on their political beliefs, some at that point invoke political arguments against renewable energy and denying climate change.

For the most straightforward evidence of how hard it is to change the cultural addiction to gasoline, just look at Harley's struggles to market its electric motorcycle.

But the segment that matters more than muscle cars or motorcycles is the family hauling/commuting crossover/SUV. This is both the fastest growing segment, accounts for far more miles driven, and is also the segment historically plagued by poor fuel economy. This is also where many manufacturers are introducing EVs and PHEVs.

The ozone hole was mostly fixed by changing refrigerants. This was fought at first until it became apparent that substitute refrigerants could be produced. At that point, the refrigerant manufacturers and the manufacturers of air conditioning equipment saw that there was a pot of gold in the transition and dropped their opposition. The consumer paid for it, but consumers are often led astray and aren't organized enough to fight for their self interest.

No.

Montreal Protocol of 1987 forced a ban on the production and use of ozone depleting chemicals without alternatives. This was a way bigger problem than just refrigerants and aerosols. Asthma inhalers contain ozone depleting chemicals, but those are allowed due to no good alternatives (at the time). Those same companies "found" the alternatives and made them work because of it. By found, a multi-national decade long study through the UN found them before the protocol was signed. Those companies continuously fought the need to ban the old chemicals well into the 90s. No one cared or listened because of the environmental repercussions. Consumers didn't suffer from this in the least bit.

The idea it was some anti-consumer endeavor is just as silly as going green is anti-consumer because the consumer has to then pay more for oil down the road.

> This was fought at first until it became apparent that substitute refrigerants could be produced.

You mean that once costs become reasonable people moved fast and in concert to resolve the problem?

> where a supply crunch would cause the price to skyrocket

Hum... How do current prices compare the the 90's? What is the definition of "skyrocket" you were expecting?

Or are you talking about the people that kept saying we'd be back to a medieval economy? Apocalipse fantasizing is a hobby since that book exists; and I'm pretty sure it just had a different name before it, it's not sane to take those people seriously (it's not healthy to fight them either), and it's not sane to pretend everybody is like them.

Norway puts their oil revenue into a fund, and puts the surplus of this fund into their yearly budget (the rule is to use less than 3% of the current value of the fund). This amounts to about 20% of the budget I believe.

> A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold.

So what's your plan? Honest question. No sarcasm. How do we get from words to action?

You want my honest answer? No fucking clue. I'm focused on cement. I've given up on tech, IT and programming and went into the cement industry to work towards a smaller CO2 footprint in cement production. It's the second largest CO2 producer on the planet behind fossil fuels. I found making apps and backend software to be a waste of time in my own desires. There's a shit ton of science in cement and infrastructure to keep me interested.

Maybe I did give a partial answer? And I'll paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson on this one, "You can't save the world with an app." Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it. Enough people do it, someone is bound to figure it out.

This at least points to an answer, one of maybe three answers I've seen with actual credibility.

(The others are "pray that a geoengineering plan works without disaster" and "try to mitigate a whole bunch of warming while emissions gradually stabilize". Not exactly inspiring.)

Visions of fixing global warming with high gasoline prices and renewable electricity subsidies are ludicrous. Focus on reducing personal emissions is almost always a distraction (perhaps excluding air travel and diet). As soon as you dive into numbers, it becomes obvious that even the most optimistic gains from those things can't come close to solving the problem. There's just too much CO2 output from production (concrete, plastics, farming, etc.), non-car engines (cargo ships, planes, heavy machinery, etc.), and hard-to-replace, high-emissions power (e.g. coal in outlying China). And power improvements are often less good than they appear; it's common to report fossil fuel reductions without accounting for any offsetting harms like sulfur hexafluoride leaks from wind turbines, or CO2 emissions from solar panel manufacture and disposal.

That doesn't mean things are hopeless, or oil is blameless, or America should ignore the problem because China, or any of the other cop-outs. But I think you're exactly right: existing producers aren't going to roll over and quit, and meaningful state action will require promoting deep, pervasive changes, not just subsidizing rooftop solar.

We need lobbying and outreach and communication and legislation; we also need a million practical things to be made better, or used better, or supplanted. All I can see to do is pick a problem that suits me and dive in.

That's awesome! Can you share more about how you got into the cement industry? Did you need to go back to school? What was the transition like? Where did you start looking? etc?

Really, nothing special in the whole thing or to write about. First off, to be clear, I'm no saint. I figured I'd align both making money and doing my part to lower CO2. I told my business partner to be on the look out for a cement/concrete manufacturing opportunity, year later we found one (who you know situation). I'm learning the industry first hand and researching how to lower emissions (really no good solutions out there for very good reasons). I never went to school to begin with. I don't feel like sucking up to academics for permission to do anything in my life. It's another business, so there's no real transition for me. Except I get to be outside more often and get dirty. I grew up poor and did a lot manual labor as a kid. So, it's nice not being glued to a computer or chair anymore. Way easier to stay in shape now.

>Get INTO the industry you want to fix and fucking fix it.

Might as well walk the walk, I thought myself.

In my opinion, the communication approach we are using is obviously (from observing the results) ineffective.

Corodra above says: "Don't think for a second I'm "for oil". But I'm a realist. A lot more needs to happen to end oil's stranglehold. Not drum circles, UN circle jerks climate summits with teenagers crying nor bullshit "plant trees" PR stunts(past tree planting stunts have real piss poor success rates of the trees surviving after a year."

I think there's a lot of truth in this. The current propaganda/meme-based approach (repetitive half true newspaper articles, Greta Thunberg, etc) to the issue is not only not moving the ball forward, it's actually causing unrest and resentment in our populations. It is causing people who likely don't really differ all that much in underlying beliefs to split into opposing psychological/ideological camps, and as the conversation continues in this same form, become further entrenched in their opposing stances. If you pay close attention when reading forum discussions, this seems quite apparent to me, even here among relatively more intelligent HN folks.

I believe people need to start realizing this, and then we have to study the nature of the problem, and then we have to find a new approach to the global public discussion on this topic, and others like it.

My solution would simply be to massively focus on nuclear. Replace all existing coal plants with nuclear plants and plug them into the network.

Once you have mass production of nuclear power plants, you can start using nuclear power to create liquid alcohol fuels. Start a process of changing cars to electric or alcohol based fuels, the same goes for ships and eventually planes.

The process of switching to alcohol based fuels can be started in parallel, with early on using fossil fuels.

Start taxing fossil fuel usage to make people move over to liquid fuels.

This vision was created out by one of the nuclear innovates. He invented the PWR (currently used nuclear) but rejected it as a terrible design for human energy production. His insistence that PWR were not 'perfectly save' got him essentially fired. He had come up with Molten Salt reactors to fix all the issues of PWRs.

His vision was more to use nuclear heat to turn salt water into water you can use for irrigation. Not really produce Liquid fuels in a carbon neutral way but the vision makes sense.

Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s, but it would have been the most systematic approach to actually solving the problem. But of course that requires the population not to freak out about nuclear and to accept potentially higher oil prices.

> Now, unfortunately this should really have started in the 70s,

Today's solar and wind boom was started in the 70s. It's kind of amazing how many people prefer the "bird in the bush" over the "bird in the hand".

That depends on definition. Yes, people were playing around with those things. But the idea that from the 70s to 2000s you could have systematically used wind and solar to replace fossil fuels is nonsense.

Even today no industrial country is even close to having even all its energy from solar and wind. And were not even talking about transportation.

For an alternative level you can look at France. France basically removed fossil fuels from its electricity production in less then 20 years of producing nuclear. And we know that CO2 saved earlier is more valuable.

Now they never went to the step of trying to introduce alcohol fuels, as of course their goal was to limit import of oil to make the French economy resilient and not to save CO2.

> But the idea that from the 70s to 2000s you could have systematically used wind and solar to replace fossil fuels is nonsense.

I didn't say anything like that! What I meant is that the sustained technology development effort you called for actually happened for other energy-generating technologies, starting on the date you suggested. The result is that costs fell by several orders of magnitude, and also that it makes sense to widely deploy them now.

> Even today no industrial country is even close to having even all its energy from solar and wind

There are reports that Scotland has been generating 200% of household energy needs from wind alone in 2019. That sounds close to me. Here is a news report, and wiki: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/scotland-has-produced-enough...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Scotland

Doesn't burning ethanol still create CO2? I don't think we can maintain our current level of energy use from hydrocarbon based fuels (ethanol or otherwise) while still keeping CO2 emissions low.

Yes but if you get that CO2 from the air in production its carbon neutral.

But of course during the transition you would not really save on CO2. As methanol would still be produced by natural gas. But once you have it carbon neutral you can at least still use liquid fuel, and that's something the world will continue to use.

But alcohol fuels also burn much cleaner and release less actual harmful stuff and would make cities much healthier. So there are other things to consider outside of CO2.

But in general, for personal cars and stuff like that batteries are a better solution. The thing is, we could have done more alcohol fuels much earlier.

With ethanol, the carbon which burns to create the CO2 came from atmospheric CO2 in the first place, during the growth of the sugar cane which was used to produce that ethanol. That is, the CO2 emissions from ethanol are not a problem because they are matched by an identical amount of CO2 capture.

"That is, the CO2 emissions from ethanol are not a problem because they are matched by an identical amount of CO2 capture."

You're missing every other machine using non-ethanol fuel to operate which is required for harvesting/producing ethanol biofuel.

Ethanol's net CO2 output is positive, not negative. That is not good.

That would imply that producing ethanol requires more fuel than it produces, so producing ethanol costs more money (for fuel) than the resulting fuel can be sold for - which is simply not true.

While you might argue that some cases of bioethanol in the first world are essentially just farm subsidies, producing sugarcane ethanol in favorable conditions (e.g. Brazil) definitely is profitable in the financial sense and also in the CO2 sense because it saves most of CO2 emissions compared to the fossil fuels they replace.

Of course, even in ideal conditions any fuel has zero net emissions and can't possibly have a net negative CO2 contribution by itself (that would require carbon sequestration) but every liter of gasoline/diesel that gets replaced by a low-CO2 fuel means a reduction of CO2 emissions.

You shouldn't compare something against a fictional zero, you compare it against realistic alternatives, so CO2 emissions are not only acceptable but actually desirable if they replace much larger CO2 emissions.

Setting aside that these are not the CO2 emissions from "burning ethanol", do any of these "machines required for harvesting/producing ethanol" require a "non-ethanol fuel", or do they use that fuel for now just because it's convenient, and could be easily replaced by other sources? I know that the power for the refining plants is produced by burning the remainder of the sugar cane plant (which produces so much power that the refining plants sell the remainder electricity), but I don't know which fuel the trucks and tractors currently use.

Tractors and trucks currently use diesel, but you could convert them to ethanol if required. Most likely existing ones would just be gradually phased out, and new machines would just run on ethanol.

"Setting aside that these are not the CO2 emissions from "burning ethanol", do any of these "machines required for harvesting/producing ethanol" require a "non-ethanol fuel", or do they use that fuel for now just because it's convenient."

You can't set that aside. Consider the whole chain of production and usage or be consigned to a disingenuous selective argument upon the level of quack doctors. Plain and simple.

I'm primary talking about methanol, ethanol is not really as good a fuel and producing it by using biomass is not very efficient. So generally I would be against it but cars should still be able to use it.

Let's suppose this is a good plan. But it's still just a plan. How do we actually realize it? We both know voting alone won't cut it.

No clue. Some leader or party making it their program. Very trick in democracies specially today with people having been so indoctrinated into so many of the old environmentalist ideas that are counter-productive. Meaning things like Anti-Nuclear, Anti-GMO and so on.

Usually this wouldn't happen because of climate change. France pushed nuclear because they wanted to be independent of Saudi princes.

But the French example clearly shows that a industrial country can go away from fossil fuel electricity in 15 years if its actually determined to do so and using nuclear energy. And they did it with 1960s technology, the same kind of effort with modern types of nuclear plants, could potentially be even faster.

There is no question in my mind if there was political consensuses on a plan, any industrial nation could move away from 90% of fossil fuels usage within 20 years and it wouldn't actually cost as much as people tend to think.

The global economy needs to properly account for the cost of carbon emissions and reductions.

For the oil and gas industry this would translate into a tax at the pump.

Exactly right. Incentive caused bias is one of the strongest forces in economics.

I’m in general agreement with you. If governments actually cared about ending ending oil dominance they would continually increase taxes on it to financially force consumers and industry to pursue alternatives. And then use all of those tax revenues to fund renewables, public transit, and climate repair technologies. Outside of a few countries this isn’t even close to what happens in reality. Everyone will continue to squeeze as many dollars as they can out of oil drilling until demand drops to the point where it’s no longer profitable, some number of decades in the future.

>And then use all of those tax revenues to fund renewables, public transit, and climate repair technologies

And what happens when those revenues are threatened by people responding to the incentives and cutting out oil? Any money earned by environmental tax needs to go 100% into matching environmental restoration program with a hard limit defined that decommissions the program once the incentive is "complete" with acknowledgment that this is the preferred result. Otherwise you get ridiculous pervasive incentives in government that don't fix the problem and destabilize politics further