Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corodra | Hacker News Reader

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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.

"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.

> 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?

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.

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

>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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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