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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

As a Canadian, born in Calgary, Alberta, I'm saddened to hear this. But it seems to be part of the platform of the Democrats.

As a citizen of Earth, I'm of mixed feelings. On the one hand heavy crude from the tar sands, which is some of the most polluting oil on the planet, because it requires so much energy to extract, will keep shipping by rail to the United States. That involves more spills than a pipeline and burning yet more fuel. That's bad.

On the other hand that makes the prices higher and both constrains the volume of output and the price at which it's profitable to extract. Both things that mean more of that tar sands oil will stay in the ground. That's good.

On the other, other hand - more tar sands oil staying in the ground means more oil from elsewhere in the world, often from politically unstable or unfriendly regimes will replace the oil the US otherwise would have imported from Canada. That's potentially bad.

I'm not sure which outcome is better for Canada, the USA, or the world. I'm pretty sure neither Obama, Trump, not Biden had any accurate idea either.

Edit: and the downvotes are because you disagree with my economic analysis? Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines. Actually judging by the downvotes, I think it was a smart political move. I really wish HN would require a comment with a downvote, even if it's only visible to the OP.

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> On the other, other hand - more tar sands oil staying in the ground means more oil from elsewhere in the world, often from politically unstable or unfriendly regimes will replace the oil the US otherwise would have imported from Canada.

This statement has some inaccuracies in it, it is true that it will literally result in more oil from other places, but, given supply and demand, it will result in less additional oil from other sources.

Whenever a cheap source of a good is eliminated the average production price of that good is increased (assuming there is an exhaustible supply of that good at that price) so the removal, or even inconveniencing of access, to tar sands extract will cause an up-tick in prices overall and a likely unnoticeable dip in supply.

Additionally, as a Canadian myself, the Alberta oils sands have recently contributed strongly to an economic crisis in Calgary as extraction profitability has sharply declined. There is a lot of oil still left up there but Alberta needs to act now, while it has the funds to do so, to transition their economy. It is not a feasible long term revenue source.

> This statement has some inaccuracies in it, it is true that it will literally result in more oil from other places, but, given supply and demand, it will result in less additional oil from other sources.

Given strongly inelastic demand, I would say very marginally less.

> Whenever a cheap source of a good is eliminated the average production price of that good is increased (assuming there is an exhaustible supply of that good at that price) so the removal, or even inconveniencing of access, to tar sands extract will cause an up-tick in prices overall and a likely unnoticeable dip in supply.

I think we're saying the same thing?

> Additionally, as a Canadian myself, the Alberta oils sands have recently contributed strongly to an economic crisis in Calgary as extraction profitability has sharply declined. There is a lot of oil still left up there but Alberta needs to act now, while it has the funds to do so, to transition their economy. It is not a feasible long term revenue source.

Yes, they had better get serious about transitioning the economy away from oil before Calgary becomes a ghost town. People sure aren't there for the weather.

Hrm, my wording might have been a bit off itself but I mostly just wanted to highlight and rebut what could be worded in your original statement as a sort of fatalist "Even if we reduce what's coming from Canada it won't effect overall production". I do agree that the impact won't solve global warming or potentially cause a reflection in gas pump prices, but the supply is definitely elastic and while the demand is inelastic in the long term short term price fluctuations do actually cause short term fluctuations in demand so there is a fair bit of elasticity there as well.

People will find ways to reduce their car commute when prices spike and, especially, oil power plants will defer operation to cheaper (possibly less clean :sigh:) alternatives.

Given how large the oil market is and how generally inelastic the demand is, I would wager any overall reduction in demand will be marginal. There won't be no effect, but I don't see there being a large effect either.

The oil from the tar sands isn't clean, there's no great reasons for it to come from Canada (I'm Canadian too before anyone jumps on that). Sure, it's extracted under better working conditions than many places in the world, but the damage to the environment is substantial, it's a very energy intensive process and furthermore it is much worse in terms of impact and energy use than almost all other means of obtaining oil.

Alberta seems to be expecting this oil thing to keep the province going forever; it is over. Diversify, try new things, for your sake and the sake of the rest of Canada. Please stop expecting this to get better. 2015 was a warning, it's now officially ending and the time to start moving on has passed, every day not diversifying the economy of Alberta is just a day of economic procrastination.

Edit: Sure energy security, keep some for us, but let's not make it the backbone of our economy.

> there's no great reasons for it to come from Canada

Energy security, not propping up authoritarian regimes with terrible human rights records, not requiring military interventions to protect a stable supply of oil.

Maybe not good enough reasons to change the balance, but reasons nonetheless.

The US is the largest oil producer in the world.

Yet Russia is the largest oil supplier to the US

The US is the largest oil supplier to the US. You can kinda thank W for that.

I think that actually occurred under Obama.

It did, which is kind of hilarious in hindsight because he kept saying “we can’t just dig our way to lower prices”, and they had no idea that some Texan would invent fracking…

Alternative: phase out oil. Also solves those problems.

Right, while you wave your magic wand to try and accomplish that, the world will keep using oil.

Obviously, you're right long-term but it's a slow transition not a switch we can flip.

I think that economies are stubborn beasts, if they can avoid change they will. I don't think it's reasonable to expect any sort of energy transition to occur gracefully while oil is in supply. As the price goes up we'll see some industries priced out and over time we'll see early adopters convert but we're not going to see a smooth transition for the populace at large.

It really depends on what “at large” you mean and the timing. If we passed a carbon tax and told everyone that oil will never be cheaper than it is now the phase-out would be relatively smooth: people would buy smaller, fuel efficient vehicles and EVs; there’d be more carpooling and combined trips; and people would be quicker to use transit or remote work. The same is true for home heating, various trades using equipment like lawnmowers, etc. — make a clear promise and do so across the board so people have the incentive to make capital investments.

The problem there is if you need to do it quickly: if the SUV/truck trend hadn’t caught on, for example, fleet economy wouldn’t have reversed the improvements we saw in the 80s and early 90s. The longer we wait, the harder that gradual transition will be.

> Obviously, you're right long-term but it's a slow transition not a switch we can flip.

And trains lend themselves much better to slow declining transition than a new pipeline. Can be used for other cargo; are a bit more expensive so they are a mild financial disincentive; the contaminated material (tanker cars) are by definition mobile and therefore easier to deal with at EOL.

This. To me it's like being a paper form printing company when computers were just becoming mainstream. Your days are numbered, deal with it and survive or don't and you wont.

A lot of innocent people are going to feel a lot of pain when that happens (along with completely guilty people of course) - I don't think it's avoidable myself but I can definitely sympathize with the people fighting to try and cushion the transition.

We will be using petroleum products long after everyone on this forum is dead. Might still be 60-70% of current demand as well, maybe higher.

You're probably right, but i hope you're not.

I think it will change faster than that. The acceleration to electric vehicles has gone far gayer than I ever imagined possible thanks largely to Tesla. Solar and wind have also taken off in a way I would have never expected a decade ago.

All very good reasons to invest in a domestic refinery and let Canada enjoy its own riches.

USA cutting off one of the most ethical jurisdictions in the world. Sacrificing energy independence and for what? Endless war and military expense propping up authoritarian governments with ongoing human rights abuses.

Do you trust the Kenney government to diversify properly? All we've seen so far is them waste a bunch of money on Hydrogen.

Not as far as I can throw them.

I trust them more than I trusted Clark, but that's not saying much.

The economy of Alberta depends less on revenues from oil and gas than the economy of neighboring British Colombia depends on real estate (aka flipping houses), and is roughly as diversified as Ontario (in terms of % of economy coming from various sectors) which is the other heavy weight economy in Canada.

People keep saying that Alberta needs to diversify as though this is some sort of epiphany that the province refuses to have, but it honestly just reveals the ignorance of the person making that claim regarding the current economic state of Canadian provinces.

Yet Alberta is feeling economic pain in a way that Ontario and BC do not seem to share.

They aren't diversified enough.

Yeah because housing hasn't crashed (yet). Also Alberta is feeling economic pain only in comparison to the crazy boom years prior. It is still literally the highest GDP/capita of any province, its unemployment rate ranks it 5th amongst Canadian provinces, its government is still the least indebted on a per-capita basis of any province, it has the highest labor force participation rate of any province, etc, etc. The fact that Alberta is still paying federal transfer payments to the rest of Canada should be sufficient shorthand to convince you that the economy is not as dire as you would think when viewing it from the outside.

Not much else they can do with the same amount of inbound value. They are trying to go hydrogen but they have a small population, pretty right leaning and only a handful of schools. They should have tried to change their policies back in 2009 during that boom but the politicians in Alberta aren’t very forward thinking. That and they don’t play well with the rest of populated country (read BC, Ontario, Quebec)

It's hard not to be sympathetic to those Albertans whose lives will be impacted by this decision. However, for too long Canada has relied on extractive industries leading to a mild case of Dutch disease. Perhaps the loss of Keystone will jump-start Alberta's nascent start-up scene and other non-polluting sectors of its economy.

Alberta fundamentally has to shift gears - just like Saudi Arabia. The world will move on from fossil fuels and they had better have a plan to transition.

Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.

> Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.

How so? Oil production is ticking back up and is higher than any time since about 2010.

Norway is an entire country that has just slightly more people than the province of Alberta, which is to say that is it much smaller than Canada, while having oil reserves equal to or greater than those in Alberta. Alberta should obviously have been more diligent in saving up oil revenues generated, but this ignores the fact that a huge amount of oil revenues generated in Alberta have gone to help the rest of the country develop as well. Roughly 250-300 billion dollars from Alberta has transferred to the rest of the country since Alberta's discovery of oil, which would essentially give funding equivalent to the Norwegian sovereign fund. So when people say "where did all the money go?" the answer is that it went to hospitals in Chicoutimi, roads in Neepawa, schools in Battle Harbor, etc, etc. Trying to compare sovereign Norway with a single province in a confederation is always going to give a skewed view of what Alberta should or should not have done with its resource wealth.

> Alberta should obviously have been more diligent in saving up oil revenues generated

It was literally all stolen by the Federal government through equalization payment. Can't really blame Alberta here...

> Alberta fundamentally has to shift gears - just like Saudi Arabia.

The only problem here is that Alberta was forced to give up all its money in equalization payment, and has none left.

Most of Canada, outside of Alberta, has long transitioned away from extraction dominant industries. There still is a whole bunch of it around - but, in BC it accounts for 5.7% of the economy and in Canada at large all natural resource extraction only accounts for 10% of the economy. The majority of Canada's economy is now service oriented.

This claim is nominally true, but leaves out a metric boat-load of context, in the classic "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" sense. BC only has resource extraction take up 10% of it economy, but it is more dependent on real estate (aka flipping houses) as a percentage of its economy that Alberta is dependent on Oil and Gas. Flipping real estate isn't exactly a great foundation for an economy, but sure it has transitioned away from extraction.

Secondly, the majority of Canada's economy is service oriented, but due to the way Canada is structured, the super-majority of the transfer payments that the federal government makes to the various provinces comes from resource extraction generated revenues.

The following statements are not meant to be value judgements, they are just simple statements of fact that should give color to the context that is missing from the parent comment. For non-Canadian HN users, in order to guarantee a relatively equal standard of living for Canadian citizens regardless of where they happen to live, the federal government distributes billions of dollars every year to various provinces, taking from the more wealthy provinces and helping shore up the budgets of the less wealthy provinces. These revenues have been generated in overwhelmingly large part by resource extraction, and the service oriented economies of other provinces show 0 possibility of taking up the slack for these revenues should resource extraction end, they simply don't generate enough surplus on a per-capita basis. Without these revenues large portions of Canada would face absolutely devastating cuts to government revenues and thus services, and frankly no government has really put forth any sort of solution to this, outside of larger deficits on a temporary basis. How Canada navigates this difference between its aspirations, a service oriented non-resource economy, and the reality on the ground, an absolute dependence on resource revenues for current quality of life, is probably the biggest question it will face in the 21st Century.

At least when it comes to BC and Ontario we've got some insanely high margin businesses kicking around now in the form of tech companies and banking and investment - I am quite skeptical of your assessment that these industries would fail to carry the homesteading supplements and, honestly, I'm not really certain how much sense those supplements continue to make. I don't know if they're significantly impacting Canada's ability to project territorial claims at this point - most border issues outside of underwater resources and transportation control (i.e. the northwest passage for shipping) seem pretty well settled. Does supporting population living in such inhospitable areas really make economic sense to Canada?

For non-Canadians, if you live in certain economic development zones the Canadian government effectively pays you a bunch of money annually (Northern Residents Deduction) to just keep living there. We just saw how vulnerable these communities are to natural disasters like a pandemic - they also often suffer food security problems during blizzards and rail outages[1]. If there's an economic reason to support communities up there I'm all for it, but I really don't see why we want to go out of our way to subsidize that life choice.

Also specifically on the topic of BC real-estate-as-a-service - it's pretty fucking insane and I have no idea why this market is sustaining itself at this point, we're all due for a shock one of these days that will hurt really bad. That said - BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by the real estate market and, if we saw a price drop, we'd likely see a lot more labour market accessibility go along with it.

1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-servi...

We're talking about completely different things here, and it's a bit concerning that you're so confident about your understanding of the Canadian economy and various provincial economies while not knowing what Equalization payments are or how they work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Canad...

As you can see this has absolutely nothing to do with projecting territorial claims, which is why I specifically did not mention that in my description. As I did specifically mention in order to provide relatively level standards of living across the country the federal government transfers money away from more wealthy provinces to less wealthy provinces. As you can see from the table in that link I posted above, provinces like Quebec receive over 10% of their annual budget in the form of transfer payments, this is an even larger percentage of the budget for some of the maritime nations. If you look at the second table on that page you'll note that literally only Ontario and Alberta have higher than Canadian average, average incomes, indicating that these transfer payments are largely funded by those two provinces, and because Alberta is so much higher, it is largely funded by them. As I indicated, figuring out a way to square the reality of these payments vanishing with the current quality of life they afford is a huge challenge for Canada.

Secondly, you talk about Alberta needing to diversify but say "BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by real estate", do you understand that this means that BC is less diversified than Alberta? That BC is more dependent on a single sector, and that sector is literally just flipping homes, not doing any sort of productive manufacturing, or providing a service? Like, I'm not sure how you're so confident in your diagnosis of Alberta's woes, while simultaneously appearing to have no concern for BC?

Ah my apology I thought you were specifically talking about the northern resident credit. Wealth sharing between provinces is an extremely common habit world-wide, the US has loads of this and, most of the wealth sharing ends up coming from sources that aren't tied to natural resource exploitation like the financial markets in NYC. Quebec is a big beneficiary of these payments but Ontario and BC are both excluded from these benefits - losing the oil revenue likely means these payments (and nation wide standard of living) would suffer as a result but I don't think that's a surprise when it comes to considering any artificial economic action. We're talking trading some of our excess productive capacity for cleaner air or cleaner water or not being submerged due to global warming - free money won't ever emerge from regulation - but we might end up losing less "goodness" to externalities like pollution.

On the topic of BC's economy, it is unhealthy but the fact that BC's economy comes 17.4%[1] still only puts it 4.4% above Canada at large (13.01%)[2] - that compares to Alberta which derives 16.12% of it's economy from mineral/oil/gas extraction which is 7.9% above Canada at large (8.21%)[2].

BC absolutely has a real estate issue and it's quite concerning - but there is a lot more "natural" activity in that sector nation-wide compared with Alberta's oil dependency. I think it's also fair to view that while the 17.4% of BC's GDP covers pretty much all the economic activity related to real-estate the 16.12% in Alberta misses a lot of the knock-on benefits of the oil industry and dependent businesses... but that's an opinion.

1. (sourced 2018 - wikipedia) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/British_... I rounded up in the previous post

2. (sourced 2017 - wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industri...

3. (sourced 2019 - statistica whatever that is) https://www.statista.com/statistics/608354/gdp-distribution-...

> Most of Canada, outside of Alberta, has long transitioned away from extraction dominant industries

And yet, Alberta was the most economically successful province, literally subsidizing all others. Go figure how the service transition worked out...

> start-up scene and other non-polluting sectors of its economy

Because all modern-day chip are so much environmentally friendly...

Coincidentally, four major Canadian producers are uniting in an alliance for net-zero by 2050. The four are responsible for 90% of oil-sands production [1]. To me, this makes Canadian energy a more responsible source compared to many US-based and other international producers. [2]

[1] https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/major-canadian-oilsands-producers...

[2] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/oil-companies-net-...

Well, I don't think we can take all the credit. Suncor is a US company, my dad used to work there during the takeover when it was Petro Canada.

Edit: I take that back, it's always been a Canadian company. I'm thinking about something else, there was another takeover or merge with a US company back before 2000. That's before the Suncor merger.

Very heartening to see though.

Net-zero amongst companies is often a matter of paying a tax on what you still emit or shifting the accounting of emissions to not fully measure the entirety of your emissions (or to offload that onto other parts of society).

It's fine to encourage companies to try and do things like that, but it's also important to keep that congratulatory tone in check when it comes to a world that still incentivizes profits singularly and doesn't necessarily put the price of ecologic externalities that they might deserve.

Net-zero sounds perhaps cool but there should be some important education done for everybody to understand that it's far from Gross-zero (or near zero), which would be much closer to what we actually need to avoid some pretty cataclysmic collapses sooner than most people realize.

> and the downvotes are because....

The downvotes are because they disagree with your politics.

The tough part is all your statements hold truth. We must face that if we want to find real answers.

Down voting is supposed to be used to indicate a comment has no relevance to the conversation. Conversely, each of your statements must be part of the conversation.

[ upvoted ]

( instantly downvoted )

It's odd because I'm all over the place on the political spectrum, and I didn't even take a side here other than to discuss how it makes me feel thinking about the place of my birth, which will suffer, and expressing my uncertainty in whether this is a good or bad thing overall - which is more honest than what any of those politicians have done.

Maybe people don't like nuance and prefer to see the world in black and white where it agrees or disagrees with their views. I don't like to believe that's true, but it probably is in general.

It seems unfair and unnecessarily hostile to speculate about a subset of people you just addressed ("Maybe people don't like nuance and prefer to see the world in black and white") when the only thing you know about them is that they disagreed with you for some reason. It is of course natural to be annoyed by downvotes, but the urge to start painting yourself as a victim and the anonymous mass as unthinking tends to create a really bad atmosphere for discussion.

Now, if you wanted to criticize the downvote mechanism in general, maybe it would be considered off topic by HN rules, but it certainly wouldn't be unreasonable.

Edit: Also, perhaps some of your downvotes are due to your commenting on your own downvotes. Personally, I always downvote those kinds of comments (including the self-fulfilling-prophecy version: "I'll be downvoted/flagged for this, but..."), even if I find the rest of the post interesting, or completely agree with them. But I have no idea if other people do that.

Other reasons I might speculate about are just as uncharitable. Such as, they have no understanding of microeconomics as applied to a good with inelastic demand. Or they just read the first sentence and down voted and moved on.

At best I think one could argue I phrased things such that it rubbed people the wrong way. Possibly the last comment about politicians.

I agree - it’s a well reasoned post and I enjoyed reading it.

Down voting is supposed to be used to indicate a comment has no relevance to the conversation. Conversely, each of your statements must be part of the conversation.
[ upvoted ]

( instantly downvoted )

This site's guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

> Down voting is supposed to be used to indicate a comment has no relevance to the conversation.

Actually, it's not. It should be, but it's not. In fact, on HN, downvoting purely to signal disagreement, without offering any rebuttal or substance, is working-as-intended. pg and dang have said so themselves. It's one of the reasons HN is not actually the place to go for those who are intellectually curious, despite that being the site's claimed purpose.

Yeah. My first reaction is that this is great news, but as you say, the oil may now come from Brazil, Iran, etc. On the whole, I think it's a win for the environment, but I would like to see a detailed analysis of the predicted effects of this decision on oil exploration, extraction, and consumption.

I do feel a bit sympathetic for the company driving this project. They invested billions of dollars and over a decade of time only to see the project killed at the last minute. This is a consequence of our erratic and unpredictable political system - every four years we seem to completely change energy policy. It's the price of our democracy, but I'm sure it's frustrating for CEOs.

Edit: It's frustrating to see the parent comment get downvoted. If you disagree, explain why in a comment - no need to bury a perfectly reasonable perspective.

> That involves more spills than a pipeline

Have you got a good source for this? I can only find information about ocean oil spills for transport. The rail ones are barely ever mentioned and much less than the pipeline ones.

This PDF has a bit on spills on the last page.

https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/pipelines.pdf

Maybe this: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/safety-i...

... (not my area, but I was curious too)

Not sure why they are downvoting you. People here seem to not get the concept of supply and demand. Specially when the demand is inelastic in the short-medium term

> I'm not sure which outcome is better for Canada, the USA, or the world. I'm pretty sure neither Obama, Trump, not Biden had any accurate idea either.

> Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines.

Or maybe Obama, Trump, and Biden had different ideas about what "better for the USA" meant that led to them making reasonably rational but different decisions? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.

> Or maybe Obama, Trump, and Biden had different ideas about what "better for the USA" meant that led to them making reasonably rational but different decisions?

Yes, that's basically what politics is about in a nutshell, making different tradeoffs based on values. I'm not sure any of them actually had a sufficiently detailed analysis or model to justify having any certainty in their decision.

> But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.

Don't get me wrong, I don't understand the issue either. I'm just honest about that fact and merely espoused why it's a complicated dilemma. This is all unintentional consequences and it's not clear which was the best call for the environment, the countries involved, or the world at large.

I would have liked to see an in-depth study of the tradeoffs and a rational decision based on that rather than a political decision, which seems to be what we got all three times.

It was scrapped either because the Chinese decided they don’t want your tar or because we want to screw them.

That sums up the dilemma.

Killing the pipeline will help but not in a vacuum. Continued policy/pressure needs to be applied to move away from oil, which is probably best for the sake of the world.

I only downvote cause of your comments about voting. Like the guidelines say "that shit boring".

Your other points were creative even if a little /edgy/ and could(will?) get conversation on their own.

We all need to transition to renewable energy. It's not good for Canada to become more invested in the oil economy, just as electric cars, trucks and renewables are starting to boom. It's neither good for you environmentally or economically if you have a 10+ year horizon.

I think you just read the first sentence of my comment.

The OP edited their comment, now mine no longer makes sense.

So we continue prop up terrorist regimes for the next few decades.

Electric is approaching winning on its own merits. Giving billions to horrible people in the mean time is not an acceptable solution.

Oil independence is great for America and Canada. Independence “from” oil is a separate if related matter.

A half way point is to allow drilling and pipeline and add taxes to local oil and major tariffs on external oil.

We get oil independence, alternative tech will be encouraged to replace expensive oil. Only losers are people that use oil.

Isn't the US already a net exporter of oil at the moment?

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=41754

That is a recent thing. It can easily go the other way again.

Our current government structures seem incapable of planning more than 1 year out. Without radically higher oil prices it seems unlikely we'll see the large scale changes needed.

Shut down as many pipelines as we can, stop producing oil, build solar farms, build wind farms, build nuclear, everything should be on the table and done simultaneously if we want our grandchildren to have a live remotely similar to ours.

The framing of governments and media seems like only half steps are possible, but those steps will still kill us.

I wish we had a more informed perspective on oil. Yes it’s very important that we move individual and public transportation to electric now that we have the batteries to do so. Yes we need to switch energy production to renewables and zero carbon generation. Yes we need to get as much heat generation as possible for homes, commerce and industry switched to electric. All of these have in common the fact that we should not be burning oil. But, and this is a big but, we still need oil to produce a vast array of materials and compounds that our civilization depends on. Medicine and agriculture are two huge users that we cannot do without. We can’t shut down all oil production and drive the cost through the roof without destroying healthcare and creating famine. Please argue rationally, frame combustion of oil as wasteful while lionizing responsible usage that does not contribute to atmospheric CO2 and improves the human condition.

Alberta oil sands oil is the most expensive and dirtiest oil source on the planet. So when oil demand drops, the Alberta oil sands will be the first place to stop operating. Plastic will be made from the cheapest oil.

It's also possible that eventually we'll make plastic using CO2 as the feed-stock rather than oil.

The lack of productivity in the conversation comes from voices like yours which compromise themselves internally before even facing the opposing side.

Obviously if all oil companies magically shutdown today human society would be cataclysmically affected. That would never going to happen short of a "Childhood's End" style alien invasion. Any change, even with extreme external pressure, would be gradual.

That's why one must always advocate for the position purely and without compromise. Shut down this pipeline, shut down the next one that comes up. Etc etc.

"Reasonable" perspectives have not helped the planet at all in the past 50 years.

==========

EDIT:

One more thought, let's consider how EFFECTIVE the oil industry has been. Continuous profits, continuous increase in production, great subsidies. How did they do this?

Well, for one thing, they knew about global warming was caused by burning fossil fuels decades before admitting it publicly. They argued from the strongest framing of their position: "fossil fuels don't cause global warning so nothing should change"

It's only in the past decade or so that they put on a face of caring about renewables. That's because public pressure grew enough that the strongest portrayal of their side was acting like they're already doing everything they can.

Moral of the story, if you want to be affective don't compromise. The benefit of caring about the environment is at least we don't have to lie about our side, just boldly state truths and what should happen.

> That's why one must always advocate for the position purely and without compromise.

If that is your perspective then don't expect anyone to compromise with you in return.

You drive away both the opposition, as well as people in the middle, like myself, with policy positions like the one you are giving.

You could not hope to convince much of anyone in the middle, if you are unwilling to recognize opposing arguments, or address points of criticism.

If you won't budge an inch, then you should expect to lose to status quo bias, from people who would just choose to do nothing, instead of taking on an extreme position.

If I was the president I would explain how, without drastic changes, most species on earth will go extinct in the next 50 years and that humans could be one of them. Then I'd explain that we need to immediately change from fossil fuels. Then, only then, when negotiating with companies, governors, etc, we would get to the brass tacks of how, when, and what compromises could be need to make it happen.

But we're both nobodies on a public forum arguing, why, oh why, should one start from a compromised position?

So you’re just going to contradict your reasoning about “of course nothing drastic will happen” by stating “if I were president there’d be drastic changes” in the same thread? This is exactly the superficiality I was arguing against. The only convincing you’re doing is that we shouldn’t listen to you.

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