Evidence of price-fixing in the oil industry?
thebignewsletter.com
thebignewsletter.com
In the 2010s, US Shale Producers got hyped up on strong oil prices and the explosion of fracking. They massively overproduced, leading to the price cratering and a large majority of producers going out of business. Oil and gas was in severe distress from the late 2010s to the negative price drama in 2020.
When prices rebounded in early 2020s, there was a lot of scar tissue in the industry about overproduction. Producers are now extremely conservative. They are also well aware that clean energy is on the horizon and want to draw out this good cycle as long as they can.
Opposite to what the conspiracy theory states, OPEC and US Shale do not want prices to go too high in the short term, as this shock would accelerate the clean energy transition. They definitely want strong prices, but this $80-100 range is probably the sweet spot. Below $80, they might pull back, which is what we see from OPEC. But this certainly isn't some "conspiracy" to elevate oil to $200/barrel. These participants are sophisticated and are not that shortsighted.
I think the typical Democrat-Party view that "oil bad" and "oil corrupt" lacks nuance. It also ignores the profligate government spending that is driving excessive consumption (travel, etc.) causing a lot of these market dislocations the past several years. Now, they want to point the finger at some grand conspiracy. This seems not far off from Q-Anon on the other side of the political aisle.
In corporate America generally, it seems to be a widespread strategy to limit supply and drive up prices. Sometimes it's done explicitly and illegally, such as in rental housing (look up RealPage). Is there evidence that it's particular to shale production?
> I think the typical Democrat-Party view that "oil bad" and "oil corrupt" lacks nuance.
You said it, then said it lacks nuance.
Could you explain what you mean by excess consumption?
Who's culpable for the bankruptcy of businesses that were only viable under a Zero Interest Rate regime? Should we blame consumer exuberance - or excessive consumption - for pushing up interest rates and causing bankruptcies?
[https://apnews.com/article/2a21e92ed9129e91e713495c9ef50050] [https://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/kushner-compani...]
Because if he had, then he’d be easy to blame. If he hadn’t then it’s squarely on the fed isn’t it?
Since Trump explicitly did take action, why should he not get blamed for his part in it?
And excessive production is also always going to be subjective - except perhaps if we use the description ‘causes a glut of product which drives the price of a product below the reasonable/historic cost to produce that product’.
So excessive production is that which bankrupts producers. And excessive consumption is that which drives up prices unsustainably. Yeah?
This makes little sense for oil - there are no "historic norms" for the price of oil; just a very wide band of prices. The OPEC cartel was formed was to coordinate production to tame price swings and increase profitability.
> So excessive production is that which bankrupts producers. And excessive consumption is that which drives up prices unsustainably. Yeah?
These cycles are normal, and self-correcting, lagging positive-/negative-feedback cycles are a recurring theme in many disparate fields. Governments, businesses and consumers may not like the implied instability, but picking a single point on the sinusoidal plot and declaring that "this is the optimal amount of consumption/production/profits"[1] seems misguided to me, simply on the basis that its inherently unstable.
1. Or declaring an optimal number of predators and prey if it's a prey-predator cycle.
IMO, the only way to ever even attempt to judge these things is in hindsight for the reasons you state.
In this case I think he meant that government is taxing people who would avoid using oil and giving money to people who do use oil, distorting the market to use more oil than it would in a counterfactual world where policy was consumption-neutral. But given we're talking about government policy that is far from the only interpretation - in context he might mean a specific area, for example.
Right. That is why, after 3 years of a Democratic Presidency and Senate, the US is producing more crude oil than any country, ever [0]. /s
If what you said about Democrats had even a shred of validity, that would not happen.
You shrug off the FTC's evidence here, and put the word "conspiracy" in scare quotes to discredit it. But the FTC claims "Sheffield sought to align oil production across the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico with OPEC+." and "Sheffield, for example, exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials discussing crude oil market dynamics, pricing and output." It feels to me like you're disregarding any actual facts and evidence in this case for your favorite macroeconomic explanation instead.
To admit such a level of failure of the global system that they identify so strongly with is like admitting a personal weakness to some people. so they reject that possiblility any way they can.
Apparently they went with the old "if you can't beat them, join them" defensive strategy.
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/An-...
Took way too long to find that link, thanks google...
You either didn’t pay much attention to the sheer insanity of Q-Anon, or you view the world through an extremely partisan lens. Mentioning these two things in the same sentence is itself insane.
> Democrat-Party
I’ll put my money on option 2.
So, I believe it
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/energy/oil-ceo-opec-scott...
The first way is to raise interest rates. This is essentially a wealth transfer to banks and their owners while hurting individuals and businesses to stifle economic activity. This is what we always do. Why? Because capital owners demand it. The other way cannot be tolerated or entertained.
The second way is taxation. Some countries (eg Spain) enacted a windfall profits tax. Unlike interest rate hikes, taxation only targets profitable corporations. It allows a government to redistribute wealth to those who most need it, fund infrastructure and so on. And it disproportionately affects those who price gouging for massive profits, such as in the case of the oil and gas industry. Companies may reinvest profits into their business to avoid these excessive taxes. Great. Perfect. Love to see it.
This latest price-fixing scandal is going to turn into a huge deal. This is just the beginning.
But it's not th esole reason for price hikes in 2020-2022. A lot of that was because the then Trump administration browbeat OPEC into cutting production in early 2020 [1], which was a truly disastrous policy. You can see the effects on the 5 year view [2] very clearly.
But people are saying the Panama canal has a drought problem. Maybe you can help with a bucket, you'll probably have a larger impact.
Isn't that more a political problem than an economic insight though? We know fiscal policy impacts monetary phenomena (PPP loans, stimulus checks, the child tax credit, etc had inflationary effects), but it's too politically easy to spend more, and too politically difficult to raise taxes, and it's definitely too hard to do either in a timely manner in response to changing economic conditions.
But if we had given a politically independent body like the Fed control of tax / spend knobs instead of interest rates, and allowed them to evaluate whether to change those things on a scheduled basis as economic data arrive ... maybe that would also work, we'll just never get the opportunity to try it.
You'll regain your power after you destroy enough of the economy that it runs with a smaller monetary market. Your government will certainly get bankrupt a few times in the process.
The fiscal and monetary interventions are almost independent things. One can not really replace the other.
Ignoring the typo, which makes me completely confident in their ability to accurately report on these events, the claim is: that price fixing / collusion happened.
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Their evidence: "Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission released evidence confirming that collusion played a serious role in hiking oil prices at that time."
They claim that the FTC has evidence of collusion, and they link to a release from the FTC.
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The FTC evidence: "The Federal Trade Commission took action to resolve antitrust concerns [..] the proposed consent order seeks to prevent Pioneer’s Sheffield from engaging in collusive activity that would potentially raise crude oil prices"
So .. they took action to resolve "concerns", to be preventative so that "collusive activity" that could "potentially" raise prices doesn't happen, in the future.
"The FTC alleges in a complaint that Sheffield has, through public statements and private communications, attempted to collude" .. "Sheffield sought to align oil production"
So .. he "attempted" to collude, he "sought" to collude, or he did collude?
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So, to summarize, the evidence uses wording like "concerns, prevention, in the future, attempt", but nowhere states that anything actually DID happen, whereas the author of this article interprets that as evidence that it absolutely did happen?
"Sheffield, for example, exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials discussing crude oil market dynamics, pricing and output. In discussing his efforts to coordinate with Texas producers under a production cut mandated by the Railroad Commission of Texas, Sheffield said, “If Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan,” he said, adding: “I was using the tactics of OPEC+ to get a bigger OPEC+ done.”"
"NOTE: The Commission issues an administrative complaint when it has “reason to believe” that the law has been or is being violated, and it appears to the Commission that a proceeding is in the public interest. When the Commission issues a consent order on a final basis, it carries the force of law with respect to future actions."
This is also legalize, so he hasn't been PROVEN to yet; but it's obvious they have a lot of things to go through here.
And perhaps somebody else can fill in the blanks here, but so far as I can tell, the FTC is not alleging any sort of wrongdoing, but instead filing a complaint against a proposed merger between Exxon and another company, which could enable larger scale constraints on competition. Their evidence are the messages and comments from the head of the to-be-merged company, who made efforts to follow along with OPEC price standards (or even take the lead) as a means of maximizing profit.
Where 'strategic pricing' ends and price fixing begins is not at all clear to me, especially in a field like this where global prices are actively controlled by a price fixing cartel. But it seems to me that the main article is engaging in some extreme speculation, hyperbole, and sensationalism - while presenting it all as matter of fact.
[1] - https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2410004exxonpio...
> Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” David Cicilline, Chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, has called Stoller’s work “an inspiration.” Stoller is a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee.
> He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the financial crisis. While a staffer, he wrote a provision of law mandating a third party audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities. He also helped cut part of a $20 billion subsidy to large financial institutions. His 2012 law review article on the foreclosure crisis, The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship, predicted the rise of autocratic political forces, and his 2016 Atlantic article, How the Democrats Killed their Populist Soul, helped inspire the new anti-monopoly movement. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Fast Company, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, Vice, The American Conservative, and the Baffler. Stoller writes the monopoly-focused newsletter Big with tens of thousands of subscribers, which you can subscribe to here.
Something happened in the oil industry which is unexplained by economics (at least to my knowledge), and trivially explained by collusion/price-fixing.
1. Tons of producers went bust during the shale boom and covid price fallout.
2. Remaining producers see that the future will require less oil and remember the rest of the industry failing when they increased production.
3. They dont increase production.
This is exactly what economics projects. Less competition = worse prices. It doesnt take collusion for everyone to come to the same cocnlussion.
I suppose if you add in all the gas (and diesel/bunker fuel) that you pay for indirectly through transportation costs, you could come up with $3,000 per family.
It is more or less impossible to collude with the Saudis to raise the price of natural gas in the United States (lack of transport), so they must be talking about gasoline.
When price increases cause greater revenue to asset holders from consumers, there's some spectrum of spending to asset holding, and most people that own nothing are losing out, and Warren Buffett who owns a lot but is famously modest in his lifestyle is benefiting ... but how would you estimate where the breakeven point is? Is a lean FIRE person benefiting? Exxon stock has had a really strong 3 years, but we don't get to observe the counter-factual of how it would have behaved without this price-fixing.
The rational question raised here is not terrible, but several assumptions in it, together, make the mental model that has enabled rampant destruction of the one and only natural Earth in the past two decades with full knowledge of it.
I don't think it requires the mental model you're alleging at all. I'm fully in favor of taxing carbon at a rate which reflects its actual externalized costs, as well as other emissions. I've argued that DAs should charge oil companies with manslaughter when people die in heat waves. I don't drive a car, I don't eat animals, and I plant native wildflowers. Being opposed to the destruction of the planet does not mean I should not ask "who actually benefits from economic trends that everyone complains about?"
Piketty argued that the share of growth that goes to capital vs labor will determine a great deal about how inequality changes over time, and insofar as artificial price increases are just increased revenues to asset holders, this behavior has importance not just today but in shaping the future.
> Most stocks are not held by individuals
Isn't that a distraction? Even when stocks are held by, e.g. an insurer, another company, ultimately ownership of most wealth tracks back to some collection of natural persons. Even in cases where 'ownership' doesn't track back to people, there are still beneficiaries, e.g. people who have pensions don't directly own the assets that the pension fund holds.
that really is stretching belief.. addiction is literally implied by money flows.. the realms of the conscious and rational are easily left behind at this stage, by millions of people, and through generations.. The tides of humanity versus a small rationalization...
> I'm fully in favor of taxing carbon at a rate which reflects its actual externalized costs, as well as other emissions. I've argued
yes, I believe that you could be different.. most people, most of the time, are not different
> Piketty argued that the share of growth that goes to capital vs labor will determine a great deal about how inequality changes over time
agree Piketty is deep, and worth more attention.. so much detail however! one lifetime is not enough.. glad to see second sources on that as a whole
> artificial price increases are just increased revenues to asset holders
as if any price is not artificial !! but OK, some theory can be useful.. are markets rational, really?
> Isn't that a distraction? ... wealth tracks back to some collection of natural persons.
This emphasis might be satisfying psychologically, but no, really no. Game theory or management theory or even warfare in uniform, all predict that organizational behavior of humans is not just a bunch of individuals. This statement is a tip of an iceburg to economic thinking that sees companies and governments and other groups as having a "life of their own" and significantly and fundamentally changing the trajectory of outcomes.
> people who have pensions
see above. not at all the whole story of finance flows
I dunno, I think a lot of people want money but not at any cost. To me the problem is that it's so hard to actually invest in line with one's values. Businesses with carbon neutrality goals are mostly just buying into fake carbon offsets, etc.
> as if any price is not artificial
Certainly increased prices due to actual supply or demand shocks, or increased prices of inputs or labor are different from execs quietly price fixing. Maybe "artificial" isn't the right word to express that difference.
> This statement is a tip of an iceburg to economic thinking that sees companies and governments and other groups as having a "life of their own" and significantly and fundamentally changing the trajectory of outcomes.
I'm not claiming that institutions behave as just the sum of the behavior of the humans involved. And I'm not seeking an explanation of the behavior of companies or institutions. My point about stuff ultimately being held by people is only that there is a group (one might even call it a "class") of people who benefit from price increases like this, even if they are not directly owners of shares in specific companies.
I don't understand your position at all. From what I can tell you think that people who do benefit from harmful behaviors must want those behaviors to continue (I might call this "complicity") but simultaneously to believe that seeking to even describe this group of people is itself harmful. It's almost like you want the moral certainty of saying that rich people are bad, but forestall actual change which might require a lot of work and uncertainty.
> From what I can tell you think ...
no complete theory is presented by me! responding to snippets only.. systems thinking is called for, and also effects on individuals, actions by individuals.. the individual point of view explanation is certainly not sufficient nor complete
Electric cars and heat pumps.
This is why people paid a premium (until about a year ago) for electric cars. Fixed costs are better than variable costs.
Half the oil and gas production comes from an official cartel so it's kind of in the oil sector's DNA with price fixing.
That said for profit electric monopolies are indeed a scourge.
There’s also an interesting factor in timing and latency of the grid. Peak usage is typically mid afternoon. While least usage is overnight.
There’s essentially excess capacity during the time period that most people charger their car.
- electricity can be generated many different ways
- many generation sources aren't dependent on resupply. Spiking the price of lithium doesn't prevent existing batteries from working, it only makes new ones more expensive. Solar, wind, hydro and nuclear (to a lesser extent)
- electricity supply is heavily regulated, for better or worse.
And electricity prices are especially sensitive to gas/oil prices due to how European energy market prices are set. We still haven’t fully recovered from the insane gas price hike that caused all electricity to 2-4x in price (with huge downstream effects on overall inflation).
PV or if you’re further north solar thermal actually protected people from price spikes.
So, if everyone switches from oil, guess where the price gouging and collusion will move to?
I can't hook up my own ISP or manufacture my own prescription drugs quite as easily as I can put up solar panels or buy a generator.
Whatever fuel you have access to that's cheapest. For most people, that will be natural gas or propane.
If we ignore the non-fossil fuel solution mentioned, yes. The point is it's a weak natural monopoly due to multiple alternatives.
People repeatedly point at California fucking up "X" and then say "look how bad X is" ignoring that the other 48 states in the union (Texas also likes to find innovative ways to fuck things up) are doing various amounts of "alright" to "quite well actually" at "X".
For example, Maine also "deregulated" it's electricity sector in the 90s, and is only recently facing problems from the state sanctioned monopoly doing bullshit, and they have an actual excuse that we haven't built out new generation capacity since deregulation, and climate change means we have had an entire year of windstorms destroying the grid, including multiple storms taking out distribution to 1/3rd of the state.
I always thought it to be a ridiculous policy; show people the true cost of their usage and stop hiding taxes all over the place for everyone to make up the difference.
You can brag about low rates via monopoly, but someone else might be paying for em
[1] https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...
Everyone here knows that creating an electric car requires emissions; but over its lifetime it's a great improvement over a gas-burning car.
Fuck PG&E.
I live in the Bay Area, and candidly my choices for solar, inverters, batteries, heat pumps and any thing that will make a home eco friendly are abysmal.
I have a fairly unique roof for the area. There has only been one solar installer who did not run when I explained what I needed. They all have a cookie cutter approach to minimize costs and maximize profits. There is no variance or selection. It's a onesie fits all solution to a dynamic problem.
Electric water heating is interesting. You should look to install a tank and a tankless heater. It's called a booster configuration. Set the tank up to run during the day when you have free power and then only hit the tankless when it runs empty (or your variable costs are low).
Good luck finding a plumber who knows how to set it up.
I went with a heat pump water heater.
The tankless heaters use so much amperage that I'd overload my main breaker if someone took a bath while the car is charging and the heat it running.
Besides, home charging is such a game changer that using a non-traditonal fuel is just a waste of time.
> Electric cars and heat pumps.
So us renters who drive long distances every day - when can we expect to come home to a 1k mi range EV and discover our landlord installed an EV charging system and new heat pumps? Because that sounds like a pretty awesome day.
That said, 50MPG vehicles are common these days. My '07 Prius gets 48, measured, a newer Camry/Accord/Sonata hybrid will get ~50MPG as well. Add an openpilot driving system and it's almost like a private train car.
I drive 80 miles round trip, 5x a week for work. That works out to ~$2000/yr for gasoline. That's really not that bad at all! Just don't drive a crossover or truck as your daily.
I'll probably never buy electric, because I don't want to buy a house (just not for me) and I don't think apartments will install a charger-per-spot (personal requirement). That's OK, hybrid is pretty great.
On the heat pump side, I only have to heat 700 sqft - it requires little energy and is so little cost-wise I don't even track it.
And guess what the fossil fuel lobby is pumping millions upon millions of dollars in propaganda against.
It's been utterly nuts to watch in Germany - our local tabloid rags and their relentless campaign against heat pumps (as well as a botched communication regarding an energy-efficiency law from the government) actually worked good enough to put local manufacturers into a serious crisis [1]. Electric cars are in a similar bind - barely any government subsidies combined with falling gas prices, a lackluster / too expensive offering by everyone but Tesla and Tesla focusing more on the Cybertruck (that can't ever be certified to European standards) than on boosting Model 3 quality combined means that the % of electric cars on new registrations went downhill from 16% to 12% [2].
On top of the fossil fuel lobby spending comes heavy smear campaigning from Russia and its 5th column (aka, parts of the far left, as well as the most popular far-right party), who have identified anything "green" as a fracture point of society.
[1] https://www.mopo.de/im-norden/niedersachsen/auftragsflaute-w...
I would also be OK with tariffs on exports, but they are not legal (it's in the constitution: concession for southern states, protecting their cotton exports).
Also: fix Venezuela.
No end goal in sight, just make number go up.
Truong My Lan may have been a pig to be butchered. Much like SBF/CZ in the US.
I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're trying to avoid here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* I've marked this one off topic now.
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How do you aggregate just the oil industry? Well, it’s pretty clear that in 2021 and 2022, the industry did fantastically well, with the “the top 25 companies [making] more than $205 billion in profits in 2021,” and an “even more astounding” amount in 2022. Of course, not all profits are due to price-fixing, but $205 billion is just the top 25, not the whole industry. And profits got much much better the next year.
So let’s layer on a rough guess of a $200 billion increase in profits in 2021 that Scott Sheffield implies, which is 27% of the total corporate profit increase that year. That’s a pretty astounding amount, more than a quarter of the total inflationary increase being a result purely of a price-fixing scheme.
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So he's assuming that 100% of inflation is caused by corporate profits (which is beyond absurd), and then stating that since the oil industry made up 27% of total corporate profits (using evidence that seems to be wildly hand-wavey at best, even though the exact numbers are readily available), that they therefore caused 27% of all inflation. And somehow, the giant price-fixing conspiracy (which is a gross misrepresentation of what the FTC is saying) was the reason they made these 27% of profits (which is absurd).
There’s no grand conspiracy here. Shale companies over-invested in growth, lost their shirts in 2015, and got punished by investors (or went bankrupt). Then prices recovered, they over invested in growth, and got demolished again as oil prices crashed and even briefly went negative in 2020.
Fresh off these two crashes, it’s not surprising at all that companies are exercising capital discipline and not taking on debt to drill. Shareholders don’t want them to do that!
In retrospect (and these are all guesses with hazy memory) we probably overestimated the cost of turning an oil well on and off.
But exchanging text messages with OPEC to price-fix is damning. An active right wing party would decry this as foreign interference and communism (where's the free market?). Even ignoring the market impact, how can you let domestic producers collaborate with foreign governments to control such a serious macroeconomic input like this? It's like China paying Intel a bribe to produce worse chips.
I remember at the time Biden was asking (failingly) Saudi & even China to pump more oil lol
The planet's capacity to absorb CO2 is limited and too many people are too happy to be deficit spending on that account because it's not as visible. When that bill comes due, it won't be as easy to pay it off with green rectangles.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
So for sensible national-security reasons that do not apply to the US (namely, making sure it can continue to transport things like food to all its citizens if its national-security competitor gets angry at it or if the Persian Gulf becomes unstable) China is interested in electrifying its vehicle fleet since China has plenty of coal with which to generate electricity.
Because coal is the fossil fuel that produces the most carbon dioxide per unit of heat produced, it might be the an electric car in China will more greenhouse gas than a gas-powered car in the US.
Are your politicians prepared to talk about the real welfare queens in this country, the truck-driving rural population whose lifestyle is propped up by oil & gas subsidies?
I don't grasp this sentiment. It's clear it's not about feeling better about oneself but being preoccupied about a materially predicted catastrophe that can tear the fabric of many societies if left without action.
Even if it means lowering some standards of living for a while, and spending money to move us out from the high consumption of fossil fuels, it's worth it long term both in economical and social aspects.
You don't want a world where social strife due to mass starvation, mass migration, destroying societies that want to protect themselves from the potential millions that will seek refugee elsewhere where they can have food, is possible because it would be a little bit inconvenient to some of the richest folks on Earth. Those will also cause massive economical impacts, broken supply chains, less supply of some raw materials, more protectionism from nations wanting to hoard resources, wars between nations when water sources move borders or disappear altogether.
Yeah, there might be some inconveniences that are required, but previous generations had to deal with much worse inconveniences: wars, famine due to crop failure, etc.
It sounds really entitled to be offended by being asked to not drive your car so much, shop more locally produced food (and even stuff in general) if possible in your budget, change some ways of business to not require so many flights for simple meetings, so on and so forth.
There are lots of low hanging fruits, there's also massive societal changes required, we should be brave enough to be inconvenienced a little to avoid much more suffering in the lives of our kids, grandkids and so on.
Debated by whom? The laymen that are way out of the scientific consensus without anything apart from "I feel this is bad because it inconvenience me"?
The scientific consensus is pretty clear on this topic, unsure why uneducated people feel they should have a say in it...
I'm know I'm an odd duck, but I think the price of gasoline in the US is way too cheap. Even at the highest price per gallon in the US, that's about the same price per liter in Europe. I'm not considering bigOil profits in saying that. I'm saying that until the price of gasoline hurts, nobody will care about the ramifications from using it (if even then). People are less concerned about the environmental effects as they are their personal financial effects, but I'll take it either way if it reduces the use.
Look at how every single politician across all spectrum is playing politics and PC and is on full PR mode 24/7 when on camera. That's not the kind of people who make good long term decisions just because... they are good. Not when they massively hurt back.
Or look at how the carbon tax is killing the ruling party in Canada. It reduces GHG emissions, is structured in a progressive way that's a financial benefit to most people, is strongly supported by most economists, and is wildly unpopular at large.
I think most people are unable to draw a line from the carbon tax to how it financially benefits them
It has had a very visible surface level impact of making gas more expensive at gas stations, which is very clearly not a financial benefit for individuals who drive gas cars
People need a concrete reason to believe that this puts money in their pocket. Not some just some vague assurance of "This financially benefits you"
I probably agree, but if people can't draw that line from quarterly deposits into their bank accounts, it feels pretty hopeless.
Maybe digital money is too ephemeral and the government should have insisted on mailing paper cheques to everyone.
There are deeply rooted problems with the elite and people will eventually realize that the frontrunner aint got nothing up against it.
- Joseh de MaistreNominal dollars per mile: gone down by about 10% on average since cars have gotten more efficient since 1993
Real cost per gallon: gone down by more than half, since we've had ~116% inflation since 1993
Real cost per mile: just multiply the two together and it's about 60% lower than it was in 1993.
Percentage of spend on gasoline: Gas was $1.11 per gallon in 1993, and it's about triple that today.
It costs about $1/gallon (maybe $2/gallon, with recent inflation) to suck the CO2 emitted by gasoline out of the air, and put it back in the ground.
That's a heck of a lot less expensive than dealing with the consequences of climate change, and certainly less than the amount gas prices fluctuate due to price gouging, etc.
Keystone was about pumping oil straight from Canada to the Gulf Coast for the export market, crossing key aquifers to get there. It literally never mattered with respect to US gas prices and never will regardless of what occurs in the future.
The US literally produces more oil today than any country has in the history of the world. One of the main reasons its doing so is because oil prices are high enough to sustain production. Making oil cheaper REDUCES production. Wells become unprofitable to pump and maintain. When Trump negotiated a deal to crash the oil market, thousands of people in the industry lost their jobs.