People act like oil companies are the ones burning oil. They’re just responding to demand. We need to make oil less competitive, with better alternatives. No point or even value in demonizing these companies — the whole world is complicit.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is Big Oil why people like taking planes to Hawaii?
Is Big Oil why it's much cheaper to heat with natural gas?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Heating with natural gas is incredibly expensive. It only looks cheap because most of the costs are externalised - thanks to lobbying by Big Oil.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.