Oil is all going to get transported by rail or truck. BNSF stock going up should please Buffet.
I am an Albertan who lives in Calgary, where TC Energy is headquartered. I am by no means a shill for Big Oil and am thankful that I do not work in that industry.
Having said that, I do not think that blocking the supply side of the equation helps as much as certain parties believe that it does. As long as the demand for oil exists, the suppliers will find a way.
This also has side effects that some parties do not consider: Railroads have finite capacity, and when more of that capacity is absorbed by oil shipments, there is less capacity for the transportation of other goods, like grain.
This has never been true for consumers. The only “demand” it impacts are companies, who then move their jobs to China where they can use coal powered plants.
There is no world where this artificial increase in prices is good.
Green energy is improving, nuclear is improving. It’s improving because it has to compete with alternatives, like oil. Green energy is not cheap or widespread enough today for consumers or industry. So it’s only the people of the country that lose.
- Let's buy a smaller/more efficient car instead of the bigger/less efficient one
- Let's move closer to work
- Let's carpool
- Let's not buy our teenager a car just yet
Etc, etc. Cost of ownership effects all sorts of choices, always has, always will.
-Buy smaller/more efficient computers instead of the bigger/less efficient one
-let's move closer to work
-let's share computers
-let's not buy our teenagers a computer just yet
Feels strange to read. But ok, who knows, maybe compu, umm, smartphones fall out of favour some day as well.
- Cheaper phones, they're just slower
- Lower resolution videos and images, less data, less cpu cost.
- Single shared desktop instead of everyone having a laptop
- Literally the same
---
From a business/software eng perspective
- Less compute, let things take longer.
- More efficient programming languages. Simplify problems (e.g. use aggregate statistics instead of working on the whole data set).
- Timesharing on servers
- Pen and paper for people who don't really need one? Don't buy the delivery driver a computer, just tell them where to go? This one is hard to make a business analogy out of.
> -Buy smaller/more efficient computers instead of the bigger/less efficient one
Smaller process size and better power management makes your mobile device have better battery life. 80 Plus, energy star, performance-per-watt benchmarks.
> -let's move closer to work
Hughesnet and dial-up are not good WFH options.
> -let's share computers
Cloud, client/server.
> -let's not buy our teenagers a computer just yet
Cancelled Instagram-for-kids?
I've run laptop cpu based desktops instead of desktop cpus (chromebox, nuc, lots of similar products with less known branding). It probably makes a difference, especially it you have a dedicated GPU in the desktop. Max power is certainly reduced, usually idle power too, for raw compute tasks there's a balance because the tasks will take longer and maybe end up using similar power. For games and stuff, you'll get way less fps (or lower settings, or realistically both), but use less power if you play the same amount of time.
> -let's move closer to work
I dunno how much power difference this makes.
> -let's share computers
I've done this, one at a time limits max power consumption, but may lead to higher utilization. Multiple monitors and keyboard/mice is an option too, but more fiddly. Maybe a little power savings vs two desktops, but it worked better with two gpus, so maybe not.
> -let's not buy our teenagers a computer just yet
This is kind of like the sharing one earlier.
At the same time, this forces jobs over seas and Biden lets Russia build a pipeline to Europe limiting the USAs ability to sell and compete. Literally none of this is helping the environment or the citizens he leads.
Whether impacting consumer demand is a net positive for the population (due to climate change) or net negative for the population (because it's preventing useful stuff) isn't something I really want to weigh in on on the internet, I don't hold strong enough or well supported enough opinions.
I wonder why that happened????
Well thats just not true. People make decisions about what to drive and how to drive it and how far to drive it based on the price of gas.
Also, revoking the permit can be done entirely by executive action, where a new tax would require cooperation from Congress, which the administration would never get.
Canada now has a federal carbon tax, BC has a carbon tax and Alberta did have one, but the previous government was thrown out in favour of a deeply conservative one (that is now woefully unpopular so the pro-carbon tax party is probably coming back).
You can see one possible issue with the case of the Albertan government changing. Easy to add/remove taxes, hard to add/remove pipelines. There's also even some question of whether the carbon tax will be effective. It arguably hasn't done that much in BC. This is probably because for political reasons it has been set low. A previous conservative government "froze" the tax at low rates. Scientists note the tax needs to be literally $100s more per ton of CO2 to be effective.
In my experience the carbon tax has seemed like a good idea, but has seemed in practice more of a political tool to generate the public acceptance of pipelines. The actual CO2 impact of the pipeline is absolutely in zero way mitigated by the carbon tax.
There is demand for energy. Cheap oil is a great source. If oil gets more expensive because it now has to be shipped with more risk in smaller quantities via rail/truck, then renewables can compete even better.
I don't think there's any realistic policy option to reduce energy demand as a whole, but if we can reduce demand for certain types of energy we might have a shot.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57180674
I don't think demand reduction was an objective with Keystone.
I don't see this as an environmental move based on the political signalling it buys and other moves made by the US administration. If we agree that we want to reduce demand for certain types of energy than the first thing we should do is promote FF from Canada that are relatively clean, highly regulated and produced by a trusted democracy over the ones that will be used to fill this void from 3rd-world dictators with no environmental controls.
>Tar sands extraction emits up to three times more global warming pollution than does producing the same quantity of conventional crude. It also depletes and pollutes freshwater resources and creates giant ponds of toxic waste. Refining the sticky black substance produces piles of petroleum coke, a hazardous by-product. “This isn’t your grandfather’s typical oil,” [senior policy analyst for NRDC’s Canada project] says. “It’s nasty stuff.”
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/dirty-fight-over-canadian-tar-s...
>If we agree that we want to reduce demand for certain types of energy than the first thing we should do is promote FF from Canada that are relatively clean, highly regulated and produced by a trusted democracy over the ones that will be used to fill this void from 3rd-world dictators with no environmental controls.
I was pointing out that tar-sands oil probably does not meet the "relatively clean" criteria.
If a big fat permanent pipeline makes it more cost effective to extract and sell even more tar-sand oil, then thats a loss for the environment.
A market-based acceleration in renewables energy use requires well funded energy companies to pivot. High priced oil doesn't get them to do that. Low priced oil doesn't either, but a sharp drop in oil prices can.
Some other incentive is still necessary.
Only if your costs are below the high price. Blocking this pipeline raises their costs to transport the oil, eating into profits.
I'm all for reducing oil company profits, but I think it would be better to do that through carbon taxes than by forcing operational inefficiencies.
Oil is fungible, but like any commodity it still obey's supply and demand.
but in general, i think it's better to allow a local oil industry, and properly tax and regulate it, than it is to allow all those profits to go offshore to less-regulated, less taxed foreign operations. people aren't going to stop using oil just because they can't get the locally-produced stuff.
Beyond that there's a lot of goverment effort that's needs to happen to "allow" it to be built. Securing right of ways or emininent domain on land it passes through.
If new new oil demand makes the capacity go from 9% to 12% that is one thing, and quite another going from 68% to 98%...
Of course in the end, the real solution is a carbon tax that factors the bad externalities of oil into its price (which would likely make it unprofitable for a lot of purposes regardless of the free market price). However, that seems unlikely in the near future due to one party denying that the problem even exists. In light of that, I could see a (grim) argument that really rough solutions like denying pipeline permits are the best we’ve got on hand at the moment.
Whether or not people want to think about it, Canada exports a lot of natural resources, and if they want to stop, which is fine, they better have a real plan for transitioning those industries, and have an idea of what they will do in lieu of a that huge chunk of their exports going away. Its really easy to say something like "just transition away from oil" but history has shown that it is very difficult to do, especially for a province beholden to federal policy.
These costs are massive but are largely being ignored, or just offloaded as only Alberta's problem. They are running the risk of hollowing out a huge portion of the economy without any real plan which has pretty severe consequences as seen in places like the rust belt, which will end up sowing the seeds of populist resentment amongst communities that will feel used and abandoned, especially in places that already feel largely ignored by federal politics like western Canada.
Do you have a moment to talk about Calgary? Canada is the fourth largest producer of crude oil in the world. Not bad for a county half the population of California over the same area as the USA.
They might talk a good talk, but they aren’t going to stop oil production until they run out. Same as anyone else.
Obligatory “we should have carbon taxes and cap and trade to help make the transition fair and equitable”. I’m aware the wealthy are culpable for higher per capita CO2 emissions, and as such they should bear a greater burden in this regard. Life ain’t fair unfortunately.
Interesting take on "competitive". I guess we could encourage renewables or capture externalities, but why do that when we can rig the entire system "for fairness"?
It’s a climate emergency with all of the urgency of afternoon tea. You must destroy demand for the root cause of the situation, as soon as possible (hence my comment).
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/14/e2011969118
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/fossil-fue...
... which is more expensive than transporting by pipeline, thus increasing the cost of oil, cutting the development of marginally-viable oil exploration projects, and hastening the point at which it is uncompetitive with renewables and killed. This is working exactly as intended.
That said, running a refinery also has local costs that are usually externalized, in terms of local pollution and populace movement. Canada itself though has a fairly large amount of space, but perhaps a surfeit of people. Why doesn't TC energy (or other Canada producers) build a refinery somewhere in Canada and transport to there?
The only real lever the government has is increasing fuel taxes, but that would result in roots from people who are barely making it before massive increases in transportation costs.
You missed the point. The upthread poster made a gag about BNSF as a way of arguing that this was somehow a corrupt gift to the transportation industry (which... yeah, whatever).
I quipped about Tesla to indicate that, no, the market adapts along every available axis and renewable power is if anything more likely to benefit than some rail outfit that just happens to be owned by Warren Buffett.
3% of oil goes towards residential uses.
> transportation of all those goods you buy
16% of oil goes to diesel for transportation
>plastic products, fertilizer that has allowed us to feed millions,
1.5% of oil goes to all petrochemicals combined
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
The vast plurality of oil goes to making gasoline which is used in motor vehicles.