Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sometimes society ends up in a situation where we need things that are not sustainable, like oil or coal. Producing those unsustainable products to meet the demands of society does not make the producers solely responsible for any side effects. What is immoral is trying to artificially delay the transition to more sustainable alternatives or to socialize the costs of doing business.
Oil companies have repeatedly run well funded PR campaigns with the explicit goal of discrediting arguments that more sustainable energy technology was necessary despite knowing them to be false. Similarly, they have lobbied hard to ensure that when the impacts of oil to the environment are larger than expected, society picks up the tab. This lets them be more reckless with our communal environmental resources.
I think the problem with finger pointing is that it distracts from meaningful introspection. I think there are far deeper connections between oil and consumption than the "I do my part" crowd seems to realize, from the economics of the logistics industry, all the way down to the fundamental assumption that modern growth-oriented economics and consumption are even "normal" (compared to, say, how native tribes lived eons ago). In other words, merely being aware of the need for unsustainable resources in various cases doesn't fully detach us from the reality that the system we rely on to live is broken.
Sometimes I contemplate the "weird" trees in this forest: people investing into off-grid living, or people stocking up bunkers, or isolated tribes in the middle of nowhere; and I wonder if thinking about regular society in terms of scalable homogeneous solutions isn't in a way similar to breeding cavendish bananas - highly optimized in one specific metric, but susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat (or in our case, by one of the many potential global catastrophes that scientists have been warning about)
If darwinism applies to civilizations, things ain't looking great for the vast majority of us precisely because we're stuck in a rut talking about ifs-and-buts instead of physically adapting to the logical end state of the trends we see in scientific data.
I don't think it does. An important part of the lobbying is that we know oil companies are attempting to intentionally deceive politicians and the public about the negative effects of their industry and the positive effects of competitors. That deception is the point at play, the voice of the people can be misinformed.
> If people collectively don't care to fight back at a legislative level against socialized costs, wouldn't that logically mean they're the ones ultimately responsible for their own predicament?
This reads a lot to me like blaming the victim of a scam for being scammed. I've met quite a few climate skeptics in my day regurgitating oil lobbying talking points that were known to be false when published. I don't blame them for not fully comprehending the science behind climate change, I blame those oil companies are knowingly misinforming them.
Again, going back to forests and trees, one could also say the sugar industry is deceptive, or that big tech is, or that big telecom is, etc. So clearly there's a pattern, and companies are all run by people, who are motivated by accumulation of wealth. In other words, the negative factors of the system are intrinsically a part of the system, because greed is, for better or for worse, built into it (it's quite literally the driving force for capitalist economic activity).
What I'm saying is that it doesn't really matter whether "companies lying" or "blaming the victim" is the "correct" position, the crude reality is simply that dishonest things happen as a direct negative side effect of a core principle that we as a society agreed to adopt. Pragmatically speaking, the question then becomes one of: a) what can I personally do to "surgically remove" the negative side effects of this core principle, b) if I can't, to what extent do I "care" in the dilemma between participating in a rotten system vs selfishly enjoying my life or, c) when all hope is lost, how do I take cover when shit inevitably hits the fan
It's my impression that most people have lost hope on a), are in denial about b)[0] and have no clue about c).
[0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/upton_sinclair_138285
Because, in the US at least, average people have very little actual influence over government policy relative to the influence enjoyed by business interests and the capital class.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
We merely opt to allocate that on other things instead of decarbonizing. Eg. we spend it on silly things like paving half the world, giving everyone their own car, building small (actually gigantic) cookie cutter houses in suburbs, building new fabs every few years to get more transistors on chips, cramming even more photo gadgets into phones, producing more and more Netflix Prime content, etc.
Building a ton of wind turbines and PV farms, spending years (and billions of USD) reviewing nuclear power plant permits, instead of building more efficient power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
Concentrated interests (oil companies) tend to win in battles against diffuse interests (individuals and their descendants who are threatened by climate change.)
An interesting corollary is that a "majority" oppressing a "minority" is not a going concern, but the opposite is. That is, black vs white in the United States vs. South Africa are entirely different things. (Think, 90% of the population can steal everything from 10% of the population and raise it's standard of living by about 10%. 10% of the population can steal 10% of the standard of living from the other 90% and double its own standard of living.)
>susceptible to being wiped out globally by a single unforeseen threat
I'm actually pretty optimistic about this, I think that we have enough people and growing standards of education, that assuming the technological solutions are out there, we will probably find them. The only threat that we aren't taking seriously that would really screw us up is some sort of cosmic event (I am very frustrated that with all the talks of creating a more flexible grid for renewables we aren't taking on the added burden of hardening against a solar storm, which seems inevitable. I'm pretty sure we would be pretty screwed if another Carrington Event happened today.[1])
>"democracy is the voice of the people" argument.
Serious question, is this really a point of view that people have in serious circles? I don't know a single person who believes that the US doesn't suffer from a burgeoning plutocracy. I've been calling this the second guilded age for years now, and it only seems to be getting worse. There is no Teddy Roosevelt figure rising that I see. I can only hope that the next generation of politicians will take reigning in this monster more seriously, but I'm skeptical.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event I feel like something of this magnitude would be enough of a setback on science, in many ways, that all hope might be lost of escaping the terminal state we have put the earth into.
Capitalism rests on the promise that inequality maximizes economic growth and economic growth in itself will sweep all other social problems including inequality away. Once there is a prolonged period without (high enough) growth, the promise becomes worthless. People see the inequality for what it is.
However, since there is no growth, they are barely scraping by. They have no spare resources to throw into caring about the environment. So they will all do the thing that hurts them the least today. Meaning they will prefer cheap and destructive products and services over sustainable but expensive ones. Mandating sustainability essentially forces expensive products down the throat of people but since inequality is high they can't afford them.
What truly perplexes me though is that even in Germany people will keep voting for parties that basically double "dip", they promise to ensure the availability of cheap unsustainable products but also enact policies that make inequality worse. Cheap meat and oil have basically become a form of welfare to bribe the population.
This is true for anything. For example on classic argument is about consumer safety. If the state puts up barriers to trade (eg. I can't sell my cheap lead painted toys and maybe fake generic medicine and maybe rancid meat), then things will be much more expensive.
Of course the slippery slope is many times just the continuum fallacy in disguise.
In these cases the real problem is manifold, on one part it's a serious lack of social solidarity and social safety net, and the other component is whatever the actual other part is (eg. unsafe toys that babies can swallow, health concerns about food, drugs, etc.).
Real solutions have to address both. Eg. carbon taxes with direct social dividend. (Or other variations, where the raised money goes to directly address those same issues that arise due to climate change.)
This is probably not be true for all markets or industries, of course, but I think that (and availability regarding prices) is relevant to not shifting it back onto individual consumer responsibility.
I will never understand why people protect oil companies. You know how in comic books there's always a villain going trying to DESTROY THE WORLD and it seems unrealistic and over the top?
Oil companies are this villain in the real world. They are doing their best to kill off humanity, for short term profit.
Jokes aside, I really don't see the reason for downvotes. Oil made our world what it is; but any company who still focuses on its profits while knowing alternatives exist that are better for the planet, and parallelly spending billions in PR, is downright evil.
I'd even say it's much more evil than Facebook's or Google's privacy issues that HN bashes every week.
It's an appealing story to say that the O&G economy is the villain and all the people participating in it are innocent, but the truth is, we know how to live in bronze age societies. This 'evil system' doesn't stick around because it holds us prisoner, it sticks around because most of us prefer the lifestyle. And a story that absolves us of responsibility for participating seems like just another defence mechanism the system has built up.
Normal people have much less choice than you imagine.
Even in the rich western world, only the very affluent can buy electric car instead of gas one. Only the very affluent can afford apartments in city centers so they can walk instead of driving. Nobody can change where their electricity comes from, whether is it coal or renewables. Nobody can pick between grocery store that gets its supply in diesel trucks and second grocery store that gets its supply on electric trucks and trains powered by renewable electricity. There's no "planet non-destroying iphone" next to "planet destroying iphone" in the shop for you to decide between.
Understandably people choose "iphone", but that's doesn't negate that the choice exists. Yes it's very expensive to live a modern lifestyle with fewer direct O&G inputs. It's however really cheap to live a subsistence lifestyle in the middle of nowhere without all the environment wrecking conveniences; it's not near as comfortable though.
Thus, it is responsibility of the powers that be to move in the direction which research suggests is the best for humanity's and the earth's long term existence.
Politicians are supposed to do that via taxes and subsidies to promote environment-friendly options. But, the US has shown that it's easy for a old, selfish, and dumb politicians to sway the masses with false promises and grandiose oration. And the politicians, given that they have less than 20 years remaining on this earth, are happy to fill their pockets with more money than they can use rather than giving a fuck about the future.
Secondly, the oil companies are supposed to have some sense and care for humanity and not continue choosing options that damage the earth but instead should have started shifting to environmental friendly options when they became aware of the consequences of burning oil. But, again, they are happy to forget it all in return for some extra profits. Maybe it's because they know that if they stop selling oil, some other competitor will start. But if the top oil companies actually worked with the government to get oil restricted and promote renewables, they could actually have made a difference and at least taken a step in the right direction. But they didn't even try.
It's really futile to share blame with the consumers, the world we live in does not give the average person any choice. And the average person is too damn tired with working a meaningless 8h+commute/day to even think or learn about these issues. The blame lies fully with the powers on top.
The people who oppose oil companies are often the same people who take progressive views on a lot of other topics -- gay rights, gun control, pollution, etc. And that generates an almost knee-jerk opposition: anything they are for, we must be against.
It's tribalism. If liberals are opposed to oil companies, than oil companies must be good. Then they'll be provided with arguments to support it, derived by think tanks and distributed via dedicated media, web sites, social media, etc. Those are generally pretty poor arguments, but it doesn't matter: they have a thing to say, and no particular interest in questioning it.
So the whole thing ends up being shortcut by the longstanding culture war between left and right. Neither side has to do any thinking; the thinking is all done for them. It just so happens that the anti-oil-company side is having its thinking done by scientists, while the pro-oil-company side has its thinking done by professional propagandists, political strategists, and the occasional hand on the wheel from full-time troll farms.
...by which you must mean the "culture war" that only the right wing seems to know or care about. It is not really "between" the left and right as much as it is a right-wing concept that people on the left almost universally roll their eyes at (or fall into the trap of actually responding to right-wing agitation).
"Neither side has to do any thinking"
Except that, as you point out, one side is responding to scientific results indicating a serious and growing problem, while the other is not. One side is thinking, or at worst dependent on a group of people who at least try to push their personal biases out of the way when they are thinking. The other side reflexively calls all of it some combination of "socialist," "hoax," or "government takeover," without even acknowledging the existence of a problem.
Yes, I know the downvotes are coming for this, but the fact is that the Republican party has stopped even trying. You can be pro-oil-company and also be pro-reducing-carbon-emissions. Where are the Republican proposals to develop industrial-scale carbon capture to offset all those tailpipe and smokestack emissions? Carbon capture could have been an entirely new industry for oil companies to expand into, growing their businesses while reducing net carbon emissions. Instead Republicans lined up behind someone who declared climate change to be a Chinese hoax and stopped even suggesting alternatives to the Democrats' proposed solutions.
So I can't avoid acknowledging that I do see a certain amount of culture-warrioring on the left, and a lot of people arriving at the right answer for the wrong reasons. I do that even though the things you point out are undeniable and obvious. The Republican party has stopped trying. They know perfectly well that even their nominal "centrists" are always going to side with their lunatic fringe, even as I can't control the impulse to limit my own (and earning their ire in the process).
I'm completely aware that almost every post I make with even the slightest hint of progressivism is going to be downvoted. (I'm stunned that my above post is currently sitting at +3, though I've little doubt it will be down below zero by morning.)
And yet... I grew up talking at a time when we were entitled to differences of opinion but not differences of fact. And I just can't seem to shake the way that pushed me to seek accommodations, to trust that the truth was the best way to argue and seek a compromise we could all live with. It's been a very long time since I've believed that -- over a decade. But the habits are hard to break.
I hate that companies are ruining the environment, I hate that companies are killing people with unsafe products, I hate that companies are mistreating workers, I hate that countries have bullied their way over indigenous peoples to "own" the country I live it, I hate that companies profit off of promoting things that destroy humanity as we used to know it.
But I don't see there being a clear line between who is "good" and who is "bad". My own answer, which I expect will please very few, is that we do our best in the small sphere of influence we have to be loving toward all, and beg God to save us.
You have a long way to go to prove that this vague, evil entity called an "oil company" has a will of it's own, and that will is to destroy the world. My guess is that the will of this entity is to make money, and an unfortunate side-effect is that it damages the earths ecosystem.
But then I'm not prone to ridiculous hyperbole.
If we wait for our governments to hold them to account we're not going to get anywhere.
a) everyone knows what the issues are and what changes need to be made b) everyone is willing to make the sacrifices necessary
If we've learned anything from (the entire history of the human race) it's that people who know and care will shoulder the burden of making changes while those who don't will benefit from it all.
If we want to make a dent in our fossil fuel consumption, we need meaningful action at the national and global scale by major political powers. Taxes, regulation, criminal consequences are the only way to move the needle.
edit: dougmwne said it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317665
I really think the DeFi movement is the only group making any headway there, because reducing consumption is billed as a means to further one's own self-interest there.
https://www.kochind.com/stewardship/environmental-performanc...
I am a staunch environmentalist and I full out reject any effort to make any of this somehow my personal fault and that I should guiltily stop having children, stop traveling, stop eating, stop driving or anything else. We are either all in this together, collectively solving the problem through our collectively determined governments or we're not.
More and more I think we are not going to solve this in a way that doesn't involve a massive diminishing of planetary carrying capacity. Currently we are bailing out the Titanic with a thimble.
The unintended consequence is that only the conscientious people take themselves out of the gene pool, which is counterproductive.
It will increase suffering, to remove the next generation of conscientious leaders, organisers, engineers, scientists.
I will never want my kids to bear this burden, doesn't matter whether they can or not. Anyway dystopia is waiting for them, there is no reason to bring a kid here which for the interest of the potential kid.
I worked for Ogilvy and Mather in the 00s and made the Carbon footprint stuff they mention, at least one version of it. Didn’t come up with the concept or wording, but was responsible for the web implementation in the US.
AMA, I guess
With hindsight, do you think something like that was happening at BP too?
I'm pretty sure BP spent more on marketing their sustainability initiatives than they actually spent on their sustainability initiatives.
I’ve read that oil companies were well aware of how climate change is going to develop based on their sales volume and the resulting oil consumption.
Assuming that's true for BP. To which detail was the climate change impact communicated to you? Was it an explicit requirement to focus public interest away from BP?
What is your opinion on the article in this post?
But oil companies don't run ads telling people not to buy gasoline, so you've got to come at it from a slightly different angle. Luckily, "Greener than Exxon" was a pretty low bar, so they didn't need to talk about carbon taxes or emissions. Personal energy consumption has been a part of the discourse since the 70s, and probably fit in well - virtually no one will actually change their habits in any meaningful way, but will probably come out of it feeling better about themselves and BP.
The article itself seemed kinda all over the place. I agree that the world would be a better place if her preferences would've been enacted fifteen years ago, but I'm not sure that BP's advertising campaign had that much to do with it. It wasn't 4-D chess, it was "BP = Green = Good", and literally blew up in their face a few years later when Deepwater exploded.
Bit of a technical question for your AMA, how do you see the tradeoffs in carbon footprints if supply chains shorten? There's efficiencies of scale balanced against cost of moving materials that I assume means the smallest carbon footprint for a given lifestyle requires some extended supply chains, but probably shorter than what we have today. Any thoughts on that?
Was the conversation ever blatantly villainous or was it a bit more veiled, as is the public discourse?
I think this stuff is a lot less complex than people think. Companies just want to increase sales with effective marketing that makes them look better than their competitors.
No, they’re not.
> We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives.
Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
Is Big Oil why people like taking planes to Hawaii?
Is Big Oil why it's much cheaper to heat with natural gas?
There's a certain mindset of technological determinism that says we can't control what happens with a new technological development, and how it impacts our society, but I completely disagree with it. And so do the people running a lot of the companies developing those technologies - they have and will continue to aggressively push for the policies which favor them regardless of the externalities, so we absolutely have to push for regulation of how technology is used and shapes our lives.
The way the GI Bill was structured contributed as well.
But Big Oil? Way down the list. If you aren't conceiving of the real reasons, you can't address people's true concerns. In a democracy their vote is just as valuable as yours.
However, lies are bad.
Presumably they had a motivation to tell such lies, yes? Presumably they believed that telling such lies were to their benefit? Presumably the mechanism by which they believed telling such lies would be to their benefit would be by influencing the actions of others?
Surely you don’t think the reason for the lies is just that they would feel socially awkward if they had been honest?
Presumably they perceived a risk that if they hadn’t lied, that some regulations would have been imposed.
These regulations could have restricted emissions by reducing consumption.
Yes, this would mean that consumers would lose something they wanted.
This does not justify lies.
When was the last time politicians voted for something >55% of their voters didn't want? LBJ and the Civil Rights Act? How did that turn out?
Number 1 shared American value is mass consumerism.
Cities are designed the way they are because of cars. Roads and highways cut up the city and make neighborhoods less walkable. That wasn't an accident, but the result of decades of lobbying by oil and car industries.
People like flying to places because they are fed FOMO about travel. That has a profit motive. You may find this less convincing.
And yes, it's cheaper to use natural gas because of... Drum roll... Lobbying. Consider what heating would cost if those companies were properly paying for the environmental damage they are causing. Look at California PG&E going bankrupt after the damage from the huge forest fires they kept causing. Climate damage is no less real, but who is footing the bill?
Heating with natural gas is incredibly expensive. It only looks cheap because most of the costs are externalised - thanks to lobbying by Big Oil.
1 Not to my knowledge; housing policy reflects the desire for segregation.
2 No, Hawaii is nice.
3 No, it's physics. Until very recently even a heat pump would burn more hydrocarbons using the grid than direct heating and cost a lot more.
2: Big oil did push to keep the plane fuel low (or rather inexistant) worldwide though. But true.
3: What? No. Unless recently is everything after the 70s. Heat pump was more efficient than gas heating since the 50s (at least), but was hard to control, that was the main issue. My friend grandad learned to work with heat pumps during the Franco-Algerian war (54 i think) and installed one in his home (on Oleron Island) in the 70s (first that were home-sized). I think they were built in Sweden. His career was made on this tech.
Of course, insulation is and was the most carbon-efficient investment.
The oil industry has spent much on misinformation and lobbying around their impact to climate. They are actively evil. From Standard Oil on, this industry has always been about enriching the few at the expense of everyone else. Big Oil is an active threat and everyone involved in its climate change denial needs to be removed from the energy industry.
These really aren't very similar. Big Tobacco's lies were the only thing propping up the tobacco industry. As soon as the truth became clear, their industry was absolutely crushed. The truth about climate change has been clear for decades, but unlike the situation with tobacco, the demand for Oil & Gas keeps on growing[0]. This is because, unlike tobacco, Oil & Gas is absolutely indispensable--especially for developing countries.
Lying about climate change was a terrible thing, and it cost us precious time. But we still need them to keep the lights on, and pretending that the act of producing Oil & Gas today--when it is literally a hard requirement to keep the lights on around the world-- is somehow pernicious, is just silliness. The world is stressful enough without all the outrage theatre.
So yes, lies and lobbying are propping up big oil.
source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-agreement-united-states-c...
That is a bad example of what we need the petroleum industry for. A combination of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear power could meet the world's electricity needs for many decades to come, especially as we have become so much more efficient with our electricity use compared to previous decades. The very link you provided states, "Globally, fossil fuels account for a much smaller share of electricity production than the energy system as a whole."
The bigger challenges are transportation (especially airplanes and cargo ships) and the chemicals industry, where oil is much harder to replace. Electric cars and trains are doable with sufficient infrastructure investment, but for cargo ships the only real alternative right now is nuclear power, and I am not sure we have any viable alternatives for air transport as we know it.
Gonna have to disagree with you on that one... https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PM
The specific impact of the big tobacco trials on the tobacco industry at large is still a mystery to me, though. I'd still like to see some data for the entire domestic tobacco industry's revenues (I searched, but I did not find anything) going back to the ~50s, so that we could see the impact of the very public lawsuits, the big settlement, and the implementation of warning labels. The Phillip Morris stock ticker you linked isn't very helpful in determining that impact, as it only goes back to 2008.
Cigarettes are a luxury item. Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life.
You could fire all of the corporate PR propagandists and lobbyists on the planet and I doubt it would make a dramatic dent in oil consumption.
Couldn’t possibly hurt though!
There's a good chance we could have had a carbon price or other real measures 10 or more years ago without the malignant denialism seed planted by their propagandists.
This is the most insidious and false lie that is spread. Right now we are going through a technological revolution in humanity, maybe on the level of the development of agriculture, in how we generate energy. Renewables and storage are often cheaper than fossil fuels at the moment, and they are getting cheaper just like Moore's law describes the densification of transistors on chips.
HN is full of technologists. We, of all people, should recognize the capacity for technology change. And that technology change is actual work, that needs actual funding and labor, in order to happen.
We do not need fossil fuels for modern life, if we develop the technology. Dedicated technologists and entrepreneurs over the past 50 years have made solar power the cheapest energy out there, despite massive political power and the all the money of fossil fuel companies fighting against them.
If we had prioritized solar and storage, could we have accelerated the tech's development by 10 years? 20 years?
We don't have every single aspect of technology for decarbonization solved yet. Aviation fuel, for example. But that doesn't mean we can't, it just means that we haven't tried hard enough.
I think that you raise a valid point, but also that you’re far too optimistic about renewables.
The people of HN are indeed very tech focused, and I believe that such optimism about energy transformation with renewables may be more difficult to foster if this forum were called “Engineering and physics news” simply because technologists tend to suffer from the “Law of the hammer” problem.
There are very real engineering challenges with renewables that may very well preclude the kind of dramatic progress you’re referring to. Solar and Wind for example require huge amounts of land, and have a fairly high materials throughput as their lifespan is typically only 15-20 years. All of that effort is spent gathering a diffuse source of energy. There are very real physical limits to how much energy you can gather per square foot, per kg of silica, concrete, or steel.
I think your sentiment is correct about nuclear though, which makes me wonder how much big oil has been funding groups like the Sierra Club et al. who have spent nearly half a decade campaigning against nuclear energy.
The "physical limits" of renewables are not limits to our current energy use or even an order of magnitude more. Similarly, the amount of materials is still far far far less than what is required with fossil fuels. And the amount of material needed to build a 1GW nuclear reactor is within a factor of 5-10 of what it takes to build an equivalent amount of solar power, last time I checked. Both of these are far far far less material than what's needed to generate equivalent energy from fossil fuels, it doesn't even really compare.
The complaints against renewables are pretty much insignificant, and definitet not applicable to reality, but these are the complaints that get perpetuated and listened to again and again in utility decision makers. Meanwhile, these same decision makers are not avoiding nuclear because of what environmental groups are saying, they are avoiding it only because of financial reasons. What it took to restart nuclear construction wasn't protection against environmenta lawsuits, it took the South Carolina and Georgia legislatures passing bills that would allow the utilities to bill for construction even if it weren't overbudget, and even if construction failed and the project never generated electricity. Cost is the primary barrier to new nuclear, not environmental opposition.
Nuclear has spent 50 years over-promising and under-delivering, solar and wind have spent 50 years under-promising and over-delivering. They are a study in contrasts between a hype driven field (nuclear) and a results driven field (renewables).
https://www.energy.gov/quadrennial-technology-review-0
Solar produces 4x more carbon than Nuclear:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg3/
The value of variable renewables declines with increased deployment:
https://neon.energy/Hirth-2013-Market-Value-Renewables-Solar...
Wind and solar combines receive 94x the US Federal subsidies and Fossiel fuels receives 2x (per TWh of generation):
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
There is also the fact that most wind farms use about 400x more land per TWh generation, and solar is about 150x. You can compare solar plants to nuclear on Wikipedia.
Then you’ve got the countless real world examples of where nuclear plants get shut down and the per capita emissions of that area shoot up, despite a bunch of politicians talking about renewables and clean energy (Vermont, California, etc.)
Nuclear isn’t hype. Look at France vs Germany for a great real world example of why nuclear is the better technology.
You talk about 50 years under delivering, but there have hardly been any nuclear plants even built in the last 50 years in the West, mostly due to public opposition to a technology that kills less people than wind farms.
If it’s so expensive why are places like Bangladesh, India, and China making massive investments in new reactors?
Back your main comment: These are all statistics without any significance for deployment of the technology.
For example, 15x material means.... what exactly? Is 15x more material bad somehow? Sure doesn't seem like it. The amount of material that goes into solar panels is not a fundamental constraint on their use.
When wind power "uses" land it does not require exclusive use of the land. That same land will be used for other purposes without impact. Similarly, the amount of land we need to use solar is vanishingly small.
> Look at France and Germany for a great real world example...
For France, I have looked, never found the cost numbers. I do know the Mesmer plan never reached fruition, and that only about a third of the planned reactors were built. I used to cite CANDU as a potential success too, but then somebody who knew better pointed me to the financial numbers...
Bangladesh and India are building new reactors because of corruption, the same reason that they build completely uneconomical new coal plants. China is building a few nuclear reactors, as part of a "try everything" approach, but they are building only a minuscule amount of nuclear compared to renewables, because nuclear is mostly hype, and renewables mostly deliver. Remember that even a construction power house like China, when building France's EPR design, ended up with a build that took twice as long as expected.
People bring up nuclear because it’s the only high density low carbon energy source we have. Splitting atoms produces orders of magnitude more energy than gathering sunlight. Our current reactor designs are incredibly inefficient. The ceiling of what is possible with nuclear is much higher.
If you want to preserve the environment higher power density typically means less impact.
We’ve gone from burning wood, to coal, to petroleum, to nuclear, and then took a huge step backwards on nuclear because of Cold War fears and Chernobyl. Renewables are great but nuclear is the only high power density option that can keep up with our insatiable demand for more energy in a way that doesn’t require converting vast swaths of land into wind and solar farms.
If you think that wind turbines and solar farms don’t have a negative impact on the environment you haven’t been paying attention.
Wind farms impact on insect populations for example is another new area of research and it doesn’t look very good.
15x material throughput means you have to mine/produce/transport/refine/smelt/forge 15x more materials, which means more environmental impacts for the lifecycle of those materials.
A single ACR-1000 reactor can produce more output than the 14000 acre Bhadla Solar Park in India for example, and it will last 4-5x longer.
The one emitting use case you talk about is fertilizer, and the switch from the Haber process to using electrolyzed hydrogen is already starting. It will require a decade or more of tech development to make it cheaper than existing processes, most likely, but it's almost certain to happen as we scale industrial electrolysis.
An example hydrogen fertilizer project:
https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/spain-could-become...
>> Petroleum products are a requirement for modern life.
> This is the most insidious and false lie that is spread.
Even if all energies become renewables, maybe some oil based products are still requirement (but not a big problem).
Modern life does not require that we get these end services from petroleum, it's just how we currently achieve the end goal.
Blurring this distinction between the way things are currently and what is possible is a very effective FUD technique. I want to be very clear that I'm not claiming the original poster meant to spread FUD, consciously or unconsciously, I don't know their mind. But it is definitely a persistent tactic among the fossil fuel propaganda that we are immersed in.
But it seems like we can't insist on financial reform to slow down the economy, because every crisis becomes an excuse for the central banks to pump the gas while scaring people with the deflation bogeyman. And so we're stuck focusing on direct intervention to prevent the ever growing throng of antiproductive labor from doing as much damage.
I think people want those luxuries and (many) are willing to work for them entirely independent of central bank policy.
I’ve definitely had times in my life with both modes.
There is very much a lifestyle trap in which the current work culture prevents a truly balanced approach.
I suspect one of the barriers to having a reduced work week is the cost of employee benefits. Companies want to get their money’s worth for every employee on payroll. So the options for reduced work hours are somewhat limited. If you make 75k a year, it seems every extra dollar beyond that has less value per unit of time spent to earn it. I would rather work 20-30hrs a week for half of my salary but there aren’t any employers who like that idea, nor is it easy to do the consultant/contractor thing as a solo contributor who only puts in 20-30hrs.
Personally my response (intentionally or not) has been to leave roles when I’m feeling burnt out, take some time off, learn some new skills to boost my market value, and then rinse and repeat.
Employees could push back regardless, but lack the power because the BATNA is being left with zero income in the face of huge economic rent. If housing rent were much less of your income, then your necessary burn rate would be much lower and you'd have more bargaining power.
And yeah for highly paid tech roles, a pragmatic solution is to alternate between pouring yourself into a job full time, and taking off periods of funemployment (or possibly a grassroots startup, etc). But we should recognize that's only possible due to our outsized compensation, and can't really define the economy writ large.
On average: People want nice things more than crappy things. Nice things cost money. Getting money requires doing something to create value. Creating value for most people means working at a job. If you want nicer/more things than last year or than your neighbor, you need to increase your income.
The beauty of this system is that individuals can choose to live frugally and opt-out of the race to a significant extent, taking advantage of the equity market’s consistent long-run returns to setup a system where they can work hard for 10-15 years and bank enough to live a frugal life for their lifetime. In that regard central bank’s current easy money policy is very much supportive of the choice of people consuming less than 100% of what they could rather than encouraging 100+% consumption.
That's also to say nothing of the (inherently majority of) people who can't sock away enough surplus to do that, and end up on the treadmill their entire life. Tech gives us an outsized perspective here once again, by giving us more than urban-subsistence wages such that we can save up in the first place.
As to people's want of ever-more "nice things" driving their need to work so much, I just don't buy it. Rather, I see an extreme social pressure to keep working as much as possible (try negotiating less than 5 days a week, or every third week off), and then they fill in "nice things" as a rationalization. The same sentiment is repeated in many different areas (spend more time with your kids, etc), but yet few can individually move in that direction without totally eschewing the system ("pulling the ripcord").
And while it's possible for some people to escape the treadmill, it's not a possibility for most people and therefore not sustainable for society. There's a reason people doing it get labels like retired, FIRE, startup lottery, trust fund kid, etc.
As for central bank policy, it's reflected in malinvestments like much of Surveillance Valley. One of the most glaring examples was those startups buying electric scooters in bulk, under the hope that if they filled the sidewalk that money would eventually fall in. That's misproduction (and environmental pollution) driven directly by too much capital sloshing around, seeking any sort of return.
Consume consume consume! It's good for the economy (if you don't grow exponentially at any environmental cost then you can't keep up with inflation and our economy collapses)
I don't think it works that way. I know a few people who are very financially conservative, and I am as well. None of them have responded to interest rates of 0% by consuming more. Everyone has shifted their accepted risk a little bit, but that's about it, they're still putting aside money.
On the other hand, the people I know that are spending every available coin for vacation and consumption already did so 20 years ago.
Consumers knew burning gasoline and diesel created pollution 60 years ago.
They could have push for clean alternatives but didnt.
Don’t give them a pass.
> No, they’re not.
That would be more convincing if you gave a reason why you say "no, they're not". Even better would be evidence.
> > No, they’re not.
> That would be more convincing if you gave a reason why you say "no, they're not". Even better would be evidence.
He did give his reasoning, you just chose not to quote it:
> > Like tobacco companies, oil companies have actively lied and lobbied to maintain demand and obstruct coordinated effort of exactly the kind you describe as necessary. They are not passive actors simply responding to demand as they find it.
And his reasoning was based on propaganda, if oil companies are just passive actors responding to demand, what's the need for such vicious amounts of lobbying and propaganda? My guess is that they're creating the need, and making sure that information and products that go against that propaganda don't become widespread.
I'll act in good faith and believe they are.
One quick summary by the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382
Choice quotes from above: "... I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind.
They (the oil execs) were saying things that were contradicting their own world-class research groups..."
An in depth look in podcast format.
https://drillednews.com/podcast-2/
Season Summaries: Season 1: The Origins of Climate Denial traced the corporate-funded creation and spread of climate denial, including interviews with former Exxon scientists, primary source documents, and an in-depth look at the history of fossil fuel-funded influence campaigns.
Season 2: Hot Water follows a group of West Coast crab fisherman who are experiencing first-hand the devastating impacts of climate change. And this unlikely group of climate activists just became the first industry to sue big oil.
Season 3: The Mad Men of Climate Denial digs into the history of fossil fuel propaganda and the few “Mad Men of climate denial” who shaped it.
Season 4: There Will Be Fraud follows the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic to push through its wishlist of deregulation and subsidies.
Season 5: La Lucha En La Jungla looks at the decades-long battle between indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Chevron.
Season 6: The Bridge to Nowhere: A season in three parts about the past, present, and future of the natural gas industry.
I'm 100% certain they covered up the truth, but I have no reason to believe that had everyone known the truth, anyone would have cared beyond hardcore environmentalists.
Most everyone does what's convenient and necessary until otherwise required.
Perhaps to your point, there's no way out of this mess without carbon pricing, and even Democrats (who profess to believe that climate change is an existential threat) won't rally behind it even though it would free up massive amounts of money to fund their redistributive programs--choosing instead to spend large amounts of money on symbolic efforts such as a "citizens climate corps". I suspect this speaks in large part to the extent to which corporations have politicians in their pockets (certainly Joe Manchin is in the pocket of the coal industry and doesn't even pretend otherwise). Note that this isn't to say Republicans are better--by and large Republicans haven't even signed onto the idea that climate change poses an existential threat.
EDIT: everyone should write their congresspeople and urge them to support carbon pricing initiatives. Here's a dead-simple link that takes your email and your address, identifies your representatives, and gives you a form pre-populated with a canned message that will be emailed when you click "submit": https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/08/30/measuring-crude-oils-ca...
If it would be more profitable to be efficient, they would be.
Where are these mythical giant companies that are foregoing profits and doing the right thing and not getting sued by shareholders?
In that perfect world where once they knew early on that the consumption of their product would lead to an uninhabitable planet for future generations (because that's what we're facing now), couldn't they have pivoted (slowly) towards true renewables and battery technology? They could have been the leaders instead of the culprits, and positioned for greater long term growth and shareholder value, instead of the relatively short term profits of business as usual.
As long as we're writing science fiction that is... But someone somewhere made a choice to bury the science and keep the status quo, either by action or inaction.
First you had the decarbonization of the electric grid, and of course that those companies de-carbonized first. Now that cars are getting de-carbonized, you see Shell, BP and others invest in green energy as well.
These are companies that respond to shareholders, not sure how they could "invest for the greater good" at a loss without betraying their investors. Only governments can invest at a loos, if the public opinion can stomach it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcarpenter/2021/03/29/shell...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bp-bets-future-on-green-energy-...
The pollutants are uniquely permanent, and not enough effort was made to not just contaminate the world.
Perhaps the nuclear industry needs to examine why their marketing failed where the oil industry succeeded.
It’s quite possible to hate both. Yes we as a populous need to do our part too but the oil companies aren’t providing us with their services out of generosity. They’ve been actively campaigning against change. Which is literally what this submission is trying highlight.
That is not "just responding to demand," it is actively working to inflate demand. Oil companies have worked hard for decades to keep people in their cars, including participating in the conspiracy to dismantle electric streetcar lines across America (along with GM and several tire manufacturers). You say we need to make oil less competitive, but oil companies are actively working against efforts to do so.
Most of our jobs depend on the creation of demand for products and services that didn't exist yesterday. Capitalism isn't strictly about fulfilling our needs, but perpetually creating new needs, in order to perpetually generate more profit. Those needs become real, we're all complicit only in that all of us are incapable at this point of honestly living a fossil fuel free life.
We can't radically change our society at this point, but it's naive and incorrect to assume that our unsustainable way of life was the only option. Most indigenous peoples around the globe had lived in a way that was sustainable. The Pre-columbian population of the America's is estimated to have been as high as 112 million people [0]. The societies were large and complex and yet still were able to avoid destroying their local portion of the biosphere.
Even in our industrial society there have been critics of our way of life every generation and there have been people working to silence that criticism, and it's not just the average person doing this work. One the example that I find particularly surprising is that the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, published in 1972, was a fairly major part of the American zeitgeist, so much so that Ronal Reagan specifically attacked this idea in his famous quote:
> There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.
Consequently an era of aggressive neoliberalism means that ideologically people are less willing to accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is a problem than they were 50 years ago.
I think it's important not to fall into the easy trap of thinking that a bunch of evil oil execs are solely responsible for climate change, but at the same time it's overly simplistic, and perhaps equally dangerous, to simply say "this is what everyone wanted". A severe alcoholic might want to quit drinking, but at the same time wants to continue, if there is someone in that person's life encouraging and enabling their drinking we typically find that individual culpable in the former's struggle to recover.
> That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.
This is actually a description of the politics of "special interest groups" and it usually leads to horrible things. If an idea is only supported by 5% of the population, we generally do NOT want that 5% of the population driving the legislative agenda. Instead, ideas need to first gain broad support among the general population, at which point enacting legislation may be desirable in order to solve collective action problems such as preventing free riding.
It depends. The other 95% of the population might be agnostic or unaware of the idea, or the other 95% of the population might be opposed to the idea.
If Congress were to pass a law mandating funding for WWVB radio until 2050, for example, would even 5% of the population have an opinion on it either way?
"Do you want the radio signal that allows clocks to sync to keep running? Here is a list of devices you might know and use that rely on them: ..."
It also may be important enough to keep funding with 0.0001% of the budget or whatever it costs, but not important enough for a higher level of funding. Still requires advocacy.
Instead of spending your time trying to reduce your own "carbon footprint" spend it convincing other people to support legislative action.
"Big Oil" wants you to spend your time working just on yourself instead of spending your time sharing the information about why we need to reign them in. The private individual efforts of 5% of people will do less than the evangelical efforts of that same group.
The only way to solve this is to build new infrastructure that removes the need for carbon emissions, while also stopping oil extraction at an increasingly rapid pace. Anything else is a distraction, and that includes asking people to "help" by driving less.
If you want people to make good choices, those good choices need to be made possible, effective, and meaningful. This is what our politicians have been avoiding.
Here in Toronto, our local federal MP once posted on Twitter that he fights climate change by shopping at a local produce market. Not only was this absolutely not stopping climate change in any meaningful way at all, it reflects the absolute inability of the vast majority of politicians to communicate that they understand the severity of the situation, much less do anything meaningful about it.
Yes, people who refuse to recognize the problem beyond the greed of oil companies are a problem. Yes, oil companies are in fact a bigger problem. However, the biggest problem is if you want a government to stay in power long enough to actually do anything meaningful about eliminating carbon emissions, then announcing some kind of imminent intention to take away gasoline-powered cars and trucks is one of the worst things you can do.
The problem is when you slow gdp it's the most marginalized that are hit the hardest.
So, the CEO only makes 10M instead of 50M(or whatever number) but what about the poor farmer that was making just enough to run his tractor to get by and feed his family.
The correct approach is to outright ban gasoline.
There are cases where no alternative exists right now, such as flight. Those uses should be restricted away from casual use.
Yes, this means no flying on holiday, until they get hydrogen airplanes up and running.
I’m not defending the continued dependence on fossil fuels, but let’s be realistic about how (externalities aside) fossil fuels are very, very good at what they do. The problem is those externalities have turned out to be pretty bad, and our economic systems have been slow to respond.
The problems are much more specific and blatant than that:
* The externalities were known to be bad by the oil companies and this knowledge was suppressed.
* Our economic system is incapable of responding because there is no direct fiscal cost of the externalities that would make alternatives cheaper at the point-of-purchase decision point.
* Fossil fuels being good at what they do is exactly why external regulation is needed to get us out of that unhealthy addiction.
I was only trying to push back against the idea that we’re only using fossil fuels because of capitalism. We’re using fossil fuels because with our initial naive inspection they appear to be an excellent, bordering on miraculous, resource. I’m not denying that they’ve turned out to be very harmful and/or that people have done bad things to preserve the naive interpretation.
Your car or plane can't tell the difference between fossil hydrocarbons and biofuel hydrocarbons. (Though you might adjust a car to use ethanol instead of longer compounds.)
> Recently, a 5.54 fossil energy ratio (FER) was reported [1] which means one unit of fossil energy input is required to produce 5.54 units of biodiesel energy output. This FER shows a stunning energy return of biodiesel that surpasses other fuels [2].
Seems fine. And that's probably without even trying to use all electric equipment.
Amusingly, sensing an opportunity in the fast growing climate crisis FUD services market, in 2008 they launched OgilvyEarth.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=OgilvyEarth
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Unsurprisingly, doublethink is very prevalent in online discussion boards, I have observed it in both progressive and conservative spaces.
> Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one's own memories or sense of reality.[1] Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy.
An example of this within conservative spaces is demanding freedom, but supporting fascism, such as the instance where the datascientist that reported covid cases from Florida was swatted by the police and had her computers and hardware confiscated.
An example of this within progressive spaces is demanding equality across genders, but at the same time screeching about saving women and children from Afghanistan and sending men to die like pigs to the slaughterhouse. Or, supporting women's education and equality while supporting anachronistic systems found within religions that facilitate subjugation.
Can't find my CD, but there are samples and one says: "The right words, said Stalin, are worth a thousand regimen"
EDIT: Found it:
Many quote $100 to $1000/tCO2e. But if we get down to $10, getting to net zero and negative won't break the bank.
One of the largely unspoken truths of economics is that wealth is power.
Actually, it was spoken, by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, but somehow that short, succinct, critical phrase is ignored in favour of a much longer one strung together out of multiple sections over hundreds of pages using what for Smith was not an explanatory mechanism, as it's often portrayed, but of a statement of ignorance, that a cause is unknown.
Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like?
We have known for years that climate change is real, and yet the vast majority of people simply won't actually change their consumption when push comes to shove. This is the largest, most serious, tragedy of the commons that we will likely ever face. This problem is so much more complicated than just blaming a few evil CEOs.
(We can assume that state owned oil companies still captured their respective governments, we're just stipulating that a separation of corp and state can be achieved in the west)
(However, until 1990 the world remains more concerned with the threat of immediate obliteration by nuclear war than the slow problem of climate change.)
It's a well-known story, but it's based on spin* . Carter did not place the solar panels due to belief in climate change. What Carter and his staff did believe in was Peak Oil, and that it would occur in the 1980s. Also, Carter wanted to wean the US off Middle Eastern oil following the 1973 oil embargo and the 1979 oil crisis.
Solar panels were a part of Carter's adaptation effort, but a bigger part was oil shale and coal liquefaction, liquefaction being so incredibly polluting (CCS wasn't even considered at the time) we'd probably be looking at 5C had it been commonplace.
The actual priorities of the Carter effort are easily discoverable for anyone looking at the period:
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist...
* To be clear, the spin does not come from OP, but from the Democratic spin handler that years later told the solar panels story but without the context which changes the story entirely. It's easy for people to fall into the spin if they don't know the period.
Solar was only possibly due to massively unprofitable investment by the Chinese state and cheap labor. Wind costs haven't decreased nearly as much as solar and still suffer from the same problems they did decades ago. Battery technology has been driven by the consumer electronics revolution, which couldn't have been otherwise sped up.
Long story short: I'm not sure that even in a perfect world, that we would be all that different. Fossil fuels were still the cheapest source of energy for many, many decades in a rapid growing global economy. 20 years ahead is certainly a stretch. 10 years would be high case, 5 years base case...in a perfect world.
For example, the West switched quickly from Incandescent bulbs to CFLs to LEDs in the 2010s. But CFLs was arguably doable in the late 1970s, definitely in the 1990s. We could have had a far earlier CFL transition, saving decades of incandescent bulbs.
This I agree with 100% but is generally not something people have been keen to do. They want to drive more, air condition more, eat more animal protein, fly to more places, etc. The last 80 years of prosperity have been driven by increased consumption. And nobody seems keen to be the generation of "less is more".
The problem is there is a ton of overlap between people who are really concerned about global warming, and people who have an irrational fear of nuclear power.
That's a good point. I'd say it is universal greed, but the vast amount of power is concentrated in the hands of a few who do anything to preserve it.
Perhaps we need to look at others to blame...
The industrial revolution opened the floodgates for greed among all types of CEOs/Presidents that ran faster than the law or science could keep up. Although I doubt the blighted factory towns in England that lived under perpetual smog darkness were like "Sure, this is OK for the environment."
The baby boom? Everyone wanted to live in suburbs, which required cars, roads, tires, gasoline, oil?
American's sense of entitlement? "I deserve more and I'm going to take it?" Let's be honest, most americans are greedy seflish bunch who think "Well, this one little thing isn't going to hurt anyone this time..." x 1,000,000 instances.
It's probably just the fruition of Manifest Destiny: man's toxic urge to conquer and oppress: only the strong survive, winner take all, yadda yadda yadda. When is the last time you heard a leader (with actual power!!!) say, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we were all just nice to each other?" ... And that guy was nailed to a tree...
It's not that easy. There would be no failed/struggling businesses otherwise. CEOs would just will their enterprises into success.
> The baby boom? Everyone wanted to live in suburbs, which required cars, roads, tires, gasoline, oil?
Now we're talking. Those greedy CEOs are just people. Greedy people like everyone else. A handful of greedy CEOs didn't force billions of people to collectively emit 1.5 trillion tons of CO2.
Solving the problem requires giving these people an alternative. This isn't some attempt at absolving whatever issues people have categorically with CEOs, rather just a realistic take on what needs to happen to unfuck the planet.
Oh by golly they certainly did! They tore up public transportation, forcing people to buy cars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
The suburbs could have had public transportation, but there was an active propaganda against that. Only poor people use buses, manipulating people into buying big, gas-guzzling cars by creating a demand for it.
And then there is 50 years of a few CEOs suppressing evidence that this was wrecking the environment.
So yes, a few evil CEOs really did work to manipulate people into ignoring their actions' consequences. I would say, given the strength of marketing and propaganda, they were indeed forced.
Think about how many engineer's have spent their entire lives optimizing ICE powertrains, with all this tech actively harming us with smog shortening our lifespans, acid rain and climate change.
You're missing the point. This didn't happen because it wasn't economical. You're just wishing for fanciful things. You might as well just wish that CO2 weren't a GHG.
Consumer demand forced R&D into ICE instead of electric.
The key point to figure out, I think, is so we know which lever(s) is most effective to fix the problem, rather than just assigning blame.
The alternate history looks more like CFCs and the ozone hole, only slower and writ larger. The time it takes to convince most people a) that there is a problem, and b) it will require big changes to address is a very important factor. If the scrambling towards renewables we see now happened in 1980 or even 1990 instead, we’d have more runway before missing some tipping points. It would be more of a behavioral adjustment instead of a crisis.
I don’t just blame the CEOs, I also blame our politicians. They only respond to big donors and public pressure. Without the billions backing the big lie, and with more time to alert people to the problem, public pressure would have won out much earlier—not that it has, yet.
Green energy could have been cost-effective decades earlier, leading to wider adoption and massive investment in research. We could have been building nuclear plants for the last several decades instead of pretending coal was still viable.
Arguably the two most important missed opportunities, imho.
We would still be left with transportation because battery tech advanced on the back of the consumer electronics revolution, but with cheap nuclear power and a functioning emissions market, we could accelerate the transition much faster.
It has a carbon tax. As to what else happens, the whole point of using a carbon tax rather than some kind of targeted reforms (bike lanes, vegetarianism, solar panels) is because allowing different solutions to compete in the market has been shown throughout history to be more effective in the majority of cases than top-down economic planning. The reason a carbon tax is the best solution is because we don't know exactly what it does. It leaves our options open.
Now, granted, there are a bunch of possible problems with the implementation of a carbon tax. But we rarely get to the point of in-depth discussions about how to implement a carbon tax. Instead, we're held up at the starting gate by pseudoscience, fearmongering, and the fantasy of individual action.
Of course, the environment doesn’t care about who has the most per capita emissions, just “cares” about the total emissions, but in terms of measuring efficiency of “how much CO2 needed to support the lifestyle of each person” it seems they currently have a better rate. Like, if you replaced a random subset of China with the population of the US, with another copy of the US, the total emissions would [edit:on average] be increased.
Therefore, I think in order to get them to decrease their rate (which is important to do due to their large population/ their large total emissions), it may be useful to lower our own rate in order to have a convincing position.
https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?topic=Environment https://datacommons.org/place/country/CHN?topic=Environment
Or do you mean “China” by “we”? Because in that case yes, the total emissions in China are greater than in the US, corresponding to their larger population (despite their per capita emissions being like half those of the US)
Have all the billions of subsidies flow into renewables, battery and electric car tech, instead of oil? Today it's slowly catching up, but we'd be decades ahead if we started decades ago.
Nobody is saying it all the fault of "evil CEOs", but it fair to point out evil CEOs and in general evil deeds by corporations.
This isn't for the benefit of oil companies, it's to placate voters, who want to pay less at the pump.
It's not as if the US government is running around dropping truck loads of cash into insanely profitable businesses.
And no, if gasoline had higher taxes, that would not be absorbed by the oil companies. It would be passed on to the consumer just like every increase in oil prices is. Gasoline has a very flat demand curve.
The two big differences between what I wanted done and what actually happened are: (1) mandatory solar systems on all new buildings (unless there is a very good special exceptional circumstance), and (2) bike lanes automatically added to every city road whenever and wherever roadworks occur, and those made grade-separated when the existing roads are 3 or more car-widths in each direction.
If you have a short-term-great, but long-term-dying business (which is all business), it's really hard to make the decision to invest in alternatives that - if successful - will invalidate your current business. You are basically investing against yourself. On the other hand if you don't do it, someone else will. This is the innovators dilemma.
From an innovators dilemma perspective, if they can pivot, they will have nailed the balance perfectly (granted, we may have fucked the planet in the process, but that's just an outcome of a demand function).
But this does not go over well with the masses.
I would like to think that heavy R&D into renewable energies would have been the priority of "Big Oil", not the alternative.
Those must have consequences.
Why taxpayers are made to give billions to them every year is beyond understanding.
We should be generally wary of corporate "Do your part!" campaigns.
You don't say... Almost sounds like planting a sign in your yard enumerating the various reasons you're a good person is the brand of activism advocated by regressive causes. Doesn't matter if you do anything to advocate those causes, so long as you pretend to care. Broadcasting it to your other privileged friends and neighbors. That way you can continue business as usual while thriving on the status-quo, but rest assured you're on a pedestal above everyone who didn't plant a sign next to their stoop proclaiming activism. Printed free of regulation in SE Asia, wrapped in plastic, shipped across the ocean, and delivered to your front door. Now if only there were a way to wear it on your face...
If anyone doubts that they are greed-driven, just ask. They don't hide it.
EDIT: HN, you're really getting juvenile. Save downvotes for low quality comments, not 100% factual comments that you simply don't like.
Even if that were not the case, we have recently swung to the other end of the pendulum, with corporate governance groups making an explicit change to work towards more than just profits a couple years ago -- https://fortune.com/longform/business-roundtable-ceos-corpor...
Soviet Russia was into oil production just as much as anyone else. The simple truth is that oil is very useful and the externalities are easy to ignore. The blame game is not useful for this situation.
They have a legal obligation to pursue profits for shareholders. This is their fiduciary duty.
And they are like this because their consumers are like this. If people weren't so "greedy" demanding hydrocarbons at rock bottom prices, and instead wanted to pay a premium for solar powered EVs, well then hell believe me they would pursue those businesses.
But the demand isn't there. Consumers are too greedy. Consumers don't want to change their behavior.
EDIT: Downvotes, but no replies. Really HN, we just downvote people we disagree with? How about tossing your hat in the ring.
They have to act in the interest of the shareholders, which could mean all sorts of things other than producing profit. That could include things like "not paying huge amounts of money on lobbying and advertising campaigns to spread misinformation about renewable energy and try to cast doubt on climate change for decades while they knew it was real"...
Oil companies/execs should be held accountable for misdeeds.
But that is a tiny fraction of the problem facing us. Let's say they came out decades ago and said "hey, there's probably going to be some repercussions for using our products" ... do you really think that would have changed anything?
We know right now what needs to be done. And yet Biden is running around pleading with OPEC to increase production to bring gasoline prices down. Why? Because people want cheap hydrocarbons, no matter how many downvotes you throw at me.
Yes. Big oil's lies and disinformation seeded the denialism that took hold in the Republican party decades ago.
It's not as if I see half of the US (Democrats) driving EVs, installing solar on their roofs, eating plant based diets, etc. Blaming Republican denial is just dishonest.
There's a whole "What if?" where the innovation and beginnings of a post-denial GOP could have happened earlier.
Not only that, but most consumers don't concretely understand the implications of "climate change" because most people can't summon a dozen climate researchers to do a study and communicate the results (indeed, in most places the actual studies are paywalled). And here too, corporations are deeply invested in making sure people believe that climate change is just a myth or that the implications aren't as severe as the science leads us to believe.
Berthold Brecht
Strong agree with this. I see people argue all the time that individual action won't do anything when it's at least a part of getting to a tipping-point where big changes are made.
It's like the public (who want stuff), companies (who want money), governments (who want votes from the public and approval from companies) and countries are locked in a stalemate all pointing fingers at each other over who is responsible and should change first. Everyone has to do their part and stop making excuses.
Eat less animal products, fly less and drive less where practical is the bare minimum everyone should be doing in my opinion instead of trying to cling on to unsustainable lifestyles as long as they're allowed to.
A wise quote from the article
This is beyond "people don't want to pay more", this is "we could get the same energy but cheaper, but that wouldn't allow the very powerfull to exhauste an available resource to depletion before they move on and leave us all with the externalised costs".
> You act like we just found out about global warming last week
Humanity isn't a borg mind. Just because science has been increasing its understanding of climate change for decades doesn't mean that the average citizen possesses a climate scientist's understanding. And the carbon industries have worked hard to ensure that laypeople and especially politicians misunderstand.
> Human nature would have given us the same result
Lobbying is human nature. Human nature already gave us this result. Banding together to overcome special interests is also human nature. Everything we do is human nature, so this isn't very meaningful. The meaningful question is whether or not we might have implemented carbon pricing by now were it not for corporate lobbying and disinformation campaigns, and I'm thoroughly convinced that the answer is "yes".
So what's the carbon footprint of an XBox Series X? What about a 20 oz bottle of Trader Joe's brand extra virgin olive oil? If this information isn't readily available to consumers, it's "opaque" for all intents and purposes.
> Every politician knows that energy costs effect everything substantially.
You give politicians far too much credit.
> Doesn’t take Nostradamus to know jacking up energy prices pissed people off.
So cut a check to everyone making less than, say, $400K (or subsidize things if that's your kink). Perfectly feasible with carbon pricing. Moreover, after a while corporations will find greener ways to reduce costs. If you're a conservative or libertarian, welcome to the free market.
> What do you think oil gas profit margins are such that they can offset taxes for anyone making less than 400,000. Lol thats like 98% of the country
This is a remarkable misunderstanding of carbon pricing. It’s not limited to domestic oil and gas production, nor are the dividends intended to reimburse 100% of anyone’s tax obligation. The dividends only offset the burden imposed by the tax. Further still, a border adjustment will bring a lot of production back to the US because polluting countries like China will no longer be able to compete as effectively.
More importantly, if we don’t pass a climate tax, we’ll have a lot bigger problem than a burden on the consumer.
You really can't drive a massive SUV where a smaller vehicle or even a bike might work perfectly well and then yell at Exxon about their greed.
2. Oil companies lobby hard to make sure people lack the aforementioned information, specifically downplaying climate change.
3. SUVs are not even a drop in the ocean compared to industrial emissions. You're reaching hard to blame consumers for what is transparently industry's fault.
We need to pass carbon pricing and decarbonize our energy sector.
Regarding #3, I don't know if your first statement is correct or not, but again it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own share of responsibility, not just the oil & gas companies supplying them.
That's neither disputed nor relevant. If SUVs were replaced with Toyota Corolas overnight, the climate situation would be negligibly better.
> it would seem to me that the consumer (industries in this case) would have their own share of responsibility, not just the oil & gas companies supplying them.
Oil and gas companies are faulted for obstructing efforts to change the status quo (lobbying and disinformation campaigns), not for supplying energy to their consumers.
Most importantly, we need to pass carbon pricing legislation (with border adjustments) so that consumers at every point in the supply chain can reason effectively about (and share incentives which are aligned with) the environment. Here's a site that makes it trivial to write your legislator: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/house/
We've all individually and collectively chosen to ignore the problem.
Now is the point where we lie and pretend no one told us and it was all somehow a conspiracy by big oil, big meat, big airline-travel etc to force us to emit when we didnt want to.
Count me out.
Fossil fuels are good for the world, The reason we used them was because we did not have any real alternative at the time. For the vast majority of history, people were dirt poor. By utilizing fossil fuels we were able to lift billions of people out of poverty.
Think about it, you cant really run an industrialized economy on 100% reneable energy.
Wind and solar are variable energy sources the more we add to the grid the more storage you have use to balance it out.
Hydro(which has its own environmental problems) and geothermal are constrained to certain regions which have favourable geography.
Fossil fuels are literally stored energy that you can stockpile and use when you want to.
We talk about replacing plastic but plastic is one of the greatest materials we ever made(its waterproof, light, flexible, we can shape it into any form and its cheap so it is accessible) just think about all the food we buy at the supermarket most of it is stored in some form plastic to keep it fresh( not talk about things it does not make sense to store in plastic ie fruit that's just silly/wasteful)
Our modern world is built with cement just look around it is everywhere, we use asphalt to build our roads and steel to build means of transport ships, trains, cars etc
We talk about decarbonization but some countries have not even really carbonized to grow their economy to what could be considered a decent standard of living. I can't see how we can look at 3rd world countries ie India/Africa and other 3rd world countries and tell them they can't grow their economies because we used up all the carbon "budget".
If there were a colony of modern humans established on an Earth-like planet that lacked surface coal seams, didn't have limestone deposits for cement, and lacked oil fields, you wouldn't expect them to shrug and say "Well, back to the stone age, I guess."
No, instead, they'd set up smart grid networks to use power when wind and solar were available and consume less energy when it was not. They'd use DC-DC converters that were more flexible under brownouts, where early energy systems didn't have that technology and had to rely on fixed transformers and fixed frequencies. They'd connect long distance, high-voltage lines between areas with hydro and geothermal energy to regions without, using pumped hydro storage when variable energy sources had excesses. Yes, they'd run Sabatier process factories to generate synthetic hydrocarbons for plastics and portable fuels, they'd precipitate calcium carbonate from ocean salts and atmospheric CO2 to make cements and ceramics; these would probably be less plentiful as a result of their cost and because they'd be aware that they don't decay but they wouldn't be nonexistent.
Our energy systems are moving bit by painful bit in this direction already. Indian, African, and other growing economies are growing in a world where renewables are cheap, where we have tech that makes them more usable, and where there's a lot of knowledge about climate and environmental science so they don't have to make the same mistakes we did.
Yes, the industrialized world works the way it does because of a history of fossil fuels. It may even have been impossible to jump-start the industrial revolution without them. But it doesn't have to remain that way.
> Fossil fuels 'were' good for 'the current human civilization, as it allowed to quickly develop technology at the cost of future' because we did not have any real alternative at the time.