Meanwhile, ConocoPhillips just got permission to drill out an estimated 600 million barrels over the next 30 years in Alaska. It’s very hard to not feel hopeless and pessimistic about the future.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but compared to many of the other actors up on the Slope, Conoco was pretty damn good.
It’s still sucking hydrocarbons out of the earth, but if someone is going to do it anyway I’d rather it was Conoco than Exxon or Hillcorp.
Those guys aren’t going to stop polluting so they can grow their economies and feed their people.
The U.S. can’t control what China and India’s energy policies are (although it certainly can greatly influence world energy markets), but it can control its own energy policy and should do that. That the U.S. is not is just making things worse.
It's about #10 overall, but most of the countries above it are tiny, and their overall production is negligible.
Canada and Australia do appear above the US on the list, though not radically so. They are somewhat smaller than the US.
Although the US is not literally #1, either overall or per capita, it's one of the best targets for reducing CO2. Its per-capita consumption is so much higher than most that it should be able to look to other developed countries for ways to reduce it, and its overall consumption is so high that any small change will have a disproportionate effect on the total.
That's a lot more words than saying "The US is the largest per-capita producer", but arguing that it isn't is really just arguing over details. The important question is "Who should be taking the biggest steps to reduce CO2" and the answer is unambiguously "The US", followed by China and the developed Western countries.
Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?most_rec...
However, its hardly large enough to move the needle on carbon emissions. I mean compared to the really big forces at work that is nothing. They wont get 30 years of oil out of there, and they know it. So its just rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic -- a project that wont meet its expectations, going into a place that was going to be massively disturbed anyways. In fact, the project may not even get built because they would need to build on permafrost and turns out that is super difficult to do properly especially when its melting. There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future but the reality is that wether or not this drilling project goes forward does not make any difference in what the future will be like.
There are however a ton of important things we can do as a society to make a better future for ourselves and those who come after us. We can do those things now, even as the death cult around fossil fuels continues its business as usual. In fact, by doing those things we make them less powerful. So while its good to recognize that things are changing irrevocably, its not like we are helpless. The important thing is to find alternatives to the status quo, find ideas that make us more resilient and then support those initiatives.
No doubt huh?
Chances are they will have a lot of really mean things to say instead about our reticence, and how little intact ecology we left them to work with.
Sure. I am amazed at the hard work of the men who cut timber and cut road and railway track through mountains and mined and hunted whales and trapped animals hundreds of years ago despite that they irrevocably destroyed ecosystems.
> Chances are they will have a lot of really mean things to say instead about our reticence, and how little intact ecology we left them to work with.
I'd say the chances are the situation would be quite recognizable, with most people wishing things were better but unwilling to sacrifice much of their own, and the most comfortable and well off who benefit most from and have the largest environmental footprints denouncing others and shifting blame, so some thought will be spared for the whalers of today, but not a great deal.
This doesn’t help: This project will cover six days of current global consumption.
Why do you jump to this straight over "less fossil fuel consumption?"
We don’t need less people, we need less conspicuous and unnecessary consumption by the few.
The world is in a transition. That transition needs to happen. However, two things are currently true:
* There is a huge demand for oil. Having friendly control (compared to hostile nations) over that flow is likely beneficial to many people in the world.
* Even with more electric vehicles, petro is used in many every day products. It will still be needed.
It's OK to be concerned about the future -- hell, I am. But a lot of hopelessness these days is an the after-effect of doomscrolling through headlines and fitting them into our current biases.
Training your brain to let every contra-worldview headline release T H E B A D C H E M I C A L S is a tough way to get through life.
Really wild.
> 120,000 thermosyphons were built into the Trans-Alaska Pipeline’s supports in the 1970s.
https://dakotafreepress.com/2021/07/11/permafrost-melting-co...
All of the concern about this project is fundamentally speculative. That doesn't mean the speculation is wrong, but little factoids like that about thermosiphons seem to be thrown into the mix to insinuate more substance and impending doom than can otherwise be fairly shown (at least shown in a popular news article).
If coal is any indication, it's entirely possible that extraction at Willow would become unprofitable long before the lease expires.
This tech is also used on buildings to keep from frost heaving. https://canada.constructconnect.com/joc/news/technology/2016...
It's not that big of a deal, consider the thermal difference between the ground and air. Also, consider it is not using any input energy to do it, simply the evaporation of ammonia!