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Comment by wedn3sday | Hacker News Reader

Here's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the ground.

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That's basically carbon cap and trade. One of the problems is how do you ensure that the oil well remains blocked off forever? The risk of fraud is pretty high, especially when you consider that the involved parties are these huge practically untouchable corporations.

Burn it at the site of extraction. That way, nobody will be able to use it !

If you have $100M worth of carbon captured from the air stored somewhere under the ground, how do you make sure nobody takes advantage of this vast supply of energy?

You will have to deal with this problem either way, going straight to the Saudi Arabian oil operator just skips the middleman.

I can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at!

But seriously, this is harder than it sounds. Unless you pay him to permanently sequester $100M of oil, I don't see how it would make a difference.

I’ve seen this happen with farm subsidies in the UK where farmers were paid to leave the land alone. However the farmers would choose the crappiest sections to leave alone and production would be unchanged. Profit.

At 50$/BBl that's 2 million barrels, or one quarter of one day's worth of oil production for Saudi Arabia alone [0]. A new technology could do far more than just 'disappearing' 100 million dollars worth of oil.

[0]https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...

You wouldn't pay the market price. Its costs money to extract oil, less than $10 per barrel in Saudi Arabia, in the $20s in the US.

http://graphics.wsj.com/oil-barrel-breakdown/

OK but if I can sell 10 million barrels of oil for $750M why would I accept $100M to keep it in the ground?

You would if your extraction costs were greater than $650M. But that's not what the comment I replied to was suggesting, they were suggesting offering $750M to keep it in the ground.

But in the next 20 or 30 years when there is another energy crisis they'll just start pumping again under the pretext of an emergency.

I wonder if there is a way to poison an oil well, so that it becomes un-economical to purify. Chemical separation is obviously what the whole petrochemical industry is about, so maybe something like injecting radioactive material. Then you pay the well owner to poison and seal off their well.

End result: Price of oil goes up, more tar sands are extracted.

How about just buying the oil and putting it into storage somewhere (maybe just buy oil ships with oil in them).

This will drive up price of oil for everyone which is the most effective way to accelerate the adoption of renewables.

The world spends 6-9bn USD per day on oil (100m barrels at 60-90 USD), maybe we start with spending 1bn per day.

Edit: Fixed calculation.

Buying oil incentivizes producing more oil

We will pump the earth empty anyway, right?

Yeah with oil reserves we know of today, most estimates put it around 50 years before we run out of it (that's with the current consumption, it doesn't take into account a completely possible increase in consumption).

That doesn't mean that a) we should extract all of it, and b) we won't find more of it.

Only if we don’t develop cheaper energy sources. If something else is cheaper, nobody is going to bother looking for expensive oil.

FWIW 100m * 100 = 10bn

Thx

> How about just buying the oil and putting it into storage somewhere

What about burying it in the ground?

If you want to drive up the price of oil for everyone, then instead of buying some oil and putting it into storage, you can just tax it, gaining revenue (that can be used for subsidizing renewables) instead of spending money to buy oil.

The problem is that driving up the price of oil for everyone significantly (so much that there would be a meaningful reduction in usage, not just a slight decrease) is politically unacceptable. Looking at historical gas crises, even literally doubling the price of gas probably would not cause sufficient reduction in driving; but a government intentionally doubling the price of gas to reduce driving would not get popular support, it get voted out for daring to impose such punitive measures.

You are certainly right from a national perspective, but the climate crisis is a global issue. By reducing supply for everyone, this wouldn't give way to loopholes and cheating (as we see for instance with carbon credits).

You are also right that raising prices was very unpopular in the past. But some things need to be done to curb fossil fuel use and support alternatives. High oil prices are the most effective way.

While climate crisis is a global issue, almost all the power for taking major, large-scale action resides at the national level. The international structure is (and is explicitly designed to be) nearly incapable of forcing major nations to do anything without their consent, so global agreements and major multilateral action (e.g. affecting the global oil supply) are feasible if and only if they are aligned with what's acceptable and desired by the separate nations.

In that regard, if we're looking at how to motivate change to actually happen, it is appropriate to look at the incentives that would/wouldn't make sense from the national perspective - because otherwise it's just empty PR and wishful thinking, proposals that have no chance to get implemented. And, to put it explicitly, climate change is not currently overriding most other aspects of national interests, far from it, it's not (yet?) the #1 or even #3 concern in most countries elections or unelected leader motivations.

That's why spending 365 billion USD per year to reduce oil supplies by 10% seems like something which could be decided nationally but have global effect. Better than taxing or carbon credits.

That would just artificially constrain supply, driving prices up and making other mining options more viable.

Reducing oil consumption by $100m worth of oil saves less than 1 million tons of CO2. We need - and the x-prize requests - solutions that can approach 10 Gt CO2 reduction per year. A one time reduction of 0.001 Gt CO2 is simply insignificant.

Oil is about $75 per barrel and world wide we consume about 35 billion barrels per year. Reducing $100M worth of oil barely makes a dent.

How would you cost-effectively enforce that commitment?

Buying the oil and not burning it.

Oil is expensive to store, and leaving it reintroduced the commitment problem

Ok, I'm open to better suggestions.

Ah yes, the thing that will solve our climate issues is to provide more capital to those groups/individuals responsible for it. Supply side Jesus would be proud.

How about paying a $1m/head bounty for every dead oilman the local militia can bring me? Seems more economical.

A modest proposal indeed.

I often wonder if, once the effects of climate change rack up a few million more dead, whether the people directly affected with nothing left to lose might go all Rambo on whatever responsible target of opportunity happens to be at hand. It certainly wouldn't take a $1m bounty. I suspect $1k would be just as effective in a couple of decades.

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