Title is misleading. Please change title to original.
Article says the cost to cleanup will be greater than the profit. This is not the total value to the economy, it is the rent extracted by the miners.
Since we all benefit from petroleum fuels, maybe it's wiser to compare cleanup vs total value instead of profit.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Either way, there is no reason to let companies off the hook for their negative impacts just because the product they produce has some societal benefit.
This is absolutely not true. Oil and gas has lifted billions out of poverty and increased everyone’s quality of life hugely. Especially in “third world” countries where there are no affordable alternative energy sources.
Fossil fuels have certainly helped improve the lives of billions. At the same time, the negative impact can't be overstated, and only gets worse with time (the more the climate changes, the higher the future cost).
Additionally, oil extracted in California for domestic consumption doesn't affect third world countries, so it's irrelevant what positive impact it might make halfway across the world.
Oil is a global market, so oil extracted in California impacts global supply and demand.
You can't know that yet because it hasn't happened and climate change predictions tell us the opposite.
Or in more familiar terms: we've been eating our young.
If the costs exceed the benefits, then society will get wealthier simply from stopping self destructive behaviour.
Amazing right?
Except we don't charge the full cost of the negative externalities so oil companies cause a lot of damage because they are under the mistaken impression that their current extraction rates are useful to society.
The reason why we care about the negative externalities of fossil fuels is that they are most likely permanent but the benefit is temporary. So the cost benefit analysis tells us we are burning too much and this ends up harming us actually and it is just that we haven't experienced most of the harm yet.
I don't know why but a lot of "blind capitalism" reeks of socialism with double standards. After all, if we followed this idea to its conclusion then the US should nationalize the oil industry. Except that isn't capitalism.