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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question to all the anti "Big Oil" commenters here: what's your alternative?

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.

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Roughly diverges from Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan not taking them off. Other countries follow France in building out nuclear power as a substitute, while investigating how to reduce oil consumption to avoid depending on OPEC. Salter gets more wave power funding. Siemens get started on wind turbines earlier. Basically we end up 10-20 years ahead of current. And the discussion about what to do is easier because there are fewer financially motivated liars involved.

(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.)

>Roughly diverges from Carter putting solar panels on the White House and Reagan not taking them off.

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.

I'm not sure how any of this would radically change where we are today (not saying it wouldn't be better, just urging some basic PCA here).

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.

Improving energy supply methods would have been tough without future knowledge. Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.

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.

> Reducing energy consumption was however much more doable.

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".

> Other countries follow France in building out nuclear power as a substitute

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.

> This problem is so much more complicated than just blaming a few evil CEOs.

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...

> The industrial revolution opened the floodgates for greed among all types of CEOs/Presidents

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.

> A handful of greedy CEOs didn't force billions of people to collectively emit 1.5 trillion tons of CO2.

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.

50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.

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.

> 50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.

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.

Consumer demand is not, realistically, an isolated phenomenon, though. There's a tangled web of feedback in many directions among what people want to buy, what industry offers people to buy, what technologists are can work on, what R&D risks industry wants to take, and probably other factors. Advertising drives culture to some extent and reflects culture to some extent, not just one or the other.

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.

Sure, but demand drivers are usually pretty isolated. For commodities, like energy, this driver is price. People want cheap energy. And until recently, nothing could compete with dead dinos.

A large part of why it wasn't economical is that no one was being charged for the economic costs of carbon emissions. If combustion didn't have this massive subsidy, it wouldn't have been the more economical choice for so long.

Those CEOs set us back by 50 years in getting people used to the idea that we need to make changes in order to have stability in the future. They manufactured the idea that there was no problem, and therefore the greater resistance to change.

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.

Without dedicated lobbies paying politicians to ignore the problem, Republicans could have promoted conservative solutions like nuclear energy and carbon pricing.

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.

> Republicans could have promoted conservative solutions like nuclear energy and carbon pricing.

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.

>Let's imagine an alternate history where oil companies hadn't fought against climate change science. What does that alternate universe look like?

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.

Perhaps we would already apply environmental legislation to CO2 as a pollutant such that carbon intensive industries and products would be more expensive and low carbon products/industry more competitive giving consumers more choice.

Who do you mean by "we"...because some countries don't give a shit about the impact they are having on the world and still pollute the air and water worse than EU and US countries 50 years ago (China, India, etc).

China has a lower CO2 per capita emissions than the US.

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.

I'm not even sure what this comment is about. The important bit right now is trajectory. China is definitely not trending lower. They have added huge amounts of coal generation in the past year, and their carbon market is broken by design (to keep emissions cheap).

So if we reduce still further (the UK and the US have made significant cuts) you think China will think again about the 43 new coal-fired power stations now in the design stage? I'm not so sure. While paying lip service to the Green agenda, my guess is that perhaps the Chinese don't really believe that the world is headed for armageddon. They are of course happy to see ideas like 'net zero' take off in the West.

https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/

The US has been trending down per capita for the last 50 years...but the problem is we have more people so the total output is higher. China's trend, as another poster said, is always going higher.

https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?topic=Environment https://datacommons.org/place/country/CHN?topic=Environment

By “we” do you mean the US? Because the population of China is over 1 Billion, while the US population (as of 2019) is only 328 million.

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)

Under the current circumstances, sure they do. But just like skipping landlines for cellphones, if the incentives were such that developing countries could leapfrog over dirty industry without a development penalty (which could be possible had we taken a different path the last 50+ years) - they very well might.

> What does that alternate universe look like?

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.

When people talk about "subsidies" to oil, what they really mean is lower retail taxes for gasoline at the pump.

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.

Although I am currently optimistic about the future and think we’re on a good course WRT anthropogenic climate change and (peak) oil production, I do remember 15 years ago when I was worried.

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.

My takeaway from this article is "Big Oil" should have invested their billions in research on renewables, batteries, etc, instead of lawyers and fighting change.

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.

They've generated a few trillion dollars in profit over the past few decades, and now they have tens of billions at their disposal to invest in R&D now that there's a market beginning to demand it.

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).

* Oil, at minimum, gets much more expensive, more quickly. * Renewable energy develops more quickly because see the first bullet point * Nuclear doesn't die

100% agree.

But this does not go over well with the masses.

I think it is like the car industry. The push to electric vehicles has forced companies to adapt, reskill and do the R&D because they know their business will be going away in 10+ years.

I would like to think that heavy R&D into renewable energies would have been the priority of "Big Oil", not the alternative.

I find it infuriating that your perfectly reasonable question/comment is so heavily downvoted, and yet it's followed up my many thoughtful and interesting responses. Boggles the mind.

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