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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

The climate change activists who want to cut oil and natural gas production should consider the consequences:

"The price-increases stem partly from global energy costs, with the average natural-gas price in Europe for the October-December quarter 10 times as much as that for the year of 2020, according to World Bank data. Nitrogen production facilities rely heavily on natural gas to convert chemical raw materials into finished products, so rises in the natural-gas price often flow through into fertilizer costs. Major fertilizer producers including China, Turkey, Egypt and Russia also curbed exports in the second half of 2021, further pushing up global prices."

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> The climate change activists who want to cut oil and natural gas production should consider the consequences

The cause-and-effect graph is much, much more complicated than you might assume.

For example, having to compete with cheap renewable energy would force fossil fuel prices down to match, making fertiliser costs cheaper.

If fossil fuels no longer needed to be used to make gasolene, then the unused production could be redirected into chemical feedstocks instead, including industrial and agricultural chemicals.

Costs are probably rising because of reduced exports, not the other way around. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, but is usually OPEC countries price-gouging because they can. If they have to compete with non-fossil-fuel energy sources, they can't unilaterally set energy prices by reducing production or exports.

Etc, etc...

Hello! The causes of the current crisis include:

- the energy situation in China, suffering coal shortages, leading to shortfalls in the production of fertilizer, and

- hurricanes in Texas which shut down natural gas production, leading to shortages of ammonia and urea as inputs to fertilizer production, and

- all sorts of COVID stuff impacting production in lots of ways, and

- sanctions against Belarus, a major potash producer, and

- yes, the energy situation in Europe, where the renewables had a few problems and weren't quite cutting it yet, such that gas is in short supply, while Russia is saber-rattling.

It's a one-among-many thing.

One possibly better form of this argument would be to suggest this threat to global food security is a representative of the situation which would occur if activists' stated goals were met, but in this case an argument that does not clearly state words to this effect is an argument that is undermined by the fact this is much more coincidence rather than design.

Don’t underestimate the natural gas consumption by the oil industry. Since it’s cheaper than oil as an energy source, gas fuels refining, transportion and a lot of extraction of oil.

1/4 of Canada’s natgas consumption is from Alberta’s oil sands industry.

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...

What’s particularly ridiculous is an enormous amount of methane is just burned into the atmosphere as a waste product in oil fields and more is leaked into the atmosphere due to shoddy maintenance. The source material that is making fertilizer so expensive is free for the taking in some places but being wasted.

Heat + pressure + atmospheric nitrogen + catalysts + methane is being used to produce ammonia and urea which are either used directly or further reacted to produce other nitrogen compounds for fertilizer and so much more.

> The source material that is making fertilizer so expensive is free for the taking in some places but being wasted.

The key detail you neglect to mention is that those oil wells are in the middle of nowhere with no pipeline infrastructure. If the value of the natural gas being leaked was more than the cost of the infrastructure required to bring it to market, companies would have already built it.

It's not just value, it's also about embedded energy.

Spending $1000 in additional infrastructure to recover $1001 additional methane could make financial sense. But what if manufacturing that infrastructure utilized more btus of cheaper or cleaner energy than what gets recovered?

Then you're still better off not recovering it, financially and from an embedded net energy/ greenhouse gas perspective.

Methane is needed to make hydrogen, which you can easily make from electricity and water. It’s just cheaper to make from methane so there aren’t facilities to make it using green energy.

But it depends on location. Natural gas in Europe is so expensive that if you were to make hydrogen in Chile from solar, it’d be cheaper

Although I agree cutting oil and natural gas production will in the short term result in more pain and suffering in the world, in the long term the production of oil and natural gas will result in much more suffering as climate changes wrecks our ecosystems. When the Amazon becomes a desert, and the Sahara covers half of Europe, it will be too late to change your mind on what the consequences are of cutting oil and natural gas production.

Most climate change activists are aware that they're making tough choices. They've probably been living their lives in less comfort and more expenditure than the average person for years trying to give the right example.

That neighbour you know, that installed solar panels on the roof of his house 15 years ago? He probably could have taken his family to Hawaii 3 times for the money they spent on that. And he's probably only recovered his initial investment a couple years ago if you live in a northern climate, if at all.

I believe people who want to cut oil and gas pollution have been aware of the escalating cost of inaction for some time. As a minor nitpick on your post, i don't think holding an opinion on any particular topic makes anyone an 'activist' - just as i'm sure you are not a pollution activist.

This feels like a cheap & easy way to revel in scorching the earth.

If we tried to solve the energy problem at any sizable scale (nuclear or renewable, some of the low-hanging efficiencies available), so many other needs for oil & gas would taper. Prices could be stable or ideally decrease, while production is cut.

We've seen too many instances of electricity getting expensive, gas being a better alternative. We need to do better. I'm not even starting in on engaging what I think is the more contemporary geopolitical influence, the reduction in exports you cite.

The climate change activists believe artificial fertilizers are too cheap & consequently lead to destructive practices, so they may be happy about these consequences.

Yes, because we need cheap fossil fuels not a planet that supports human life. /s

It's sad that you are being downvoted. Nothing that you said was factually incorrect. People just want to squelch you because they don't like these facts and what they imply. Ideology is making things terrible for everybody.

Or, read the comments and try to understand.

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