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Comment by what-the-grump | Hacker News Reader

This is so god damned stupid that it hurts.

>It’s true that Microsoft is taking numerous steps to address the sustainability of its own operations. But for years, the company has also furnished fossil fuel giants with cloud computing services and specialized software tools powered by machine learning and AI in order to streamline and automate their operations.

Let's make the extraction of the life blood of all industry on the planet less efficient, less streamlined, less clean. And do let us all know how you plan to build the next Azure data center without using fossil fuels dug out of the ground and processed plastics.

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Why do you think that cloud computing would lend to the cleanliness or efficiency of their operations in a way that reduces the environmental burden? What stops them from using such services to extract oil more efficiently in the sense that they just produce more externalities faster?

>extract oil more efficiently in the sense that they just produce more externalities faster

You need fossil fuels to get off of fossil fuels, you need regulation, the entire planet working on this, etc. Making the process LESS efficient is not going to help at any point. Let's start blowing up the equipment used to dig coal out of the ground so we can go back to doing it by hand like in the early 1900s, and let's start unscrewing the bolts in the machines at the factories, let's all quit at CAT and never build another digger...

When some oil was “$0”, what stopped me from buying it for free, and using grant money to “bury it” (safely store or really dispose of it) and simply never burning it? Every idea in environmental management needs to be explored, because the issue is that serious.

Because oil is fungible, this has the exact same effect as limiting supply: price will increase. There are plenty of other ways to increase oil price (taxes being the simplest) that don't require creating new waste disposal sites. Burying the oil also has the nasty side effect of increasing demand, so there's a chance that, for example, OPEC will just extract more oil to meet the added demand. And extracting oil isn't "free" from an emissions perspective.

If oil costs zero its utility is zero because no one wants it. You've solved the problem!

they're referring to that time spot prices went negative during the early pandemic when nobody was driving, demand was way down, and storage suddenly became a problem.

We need to rub at least two brain cells together to conceive of anything resembling a viable plan.

"Buying" some small amount of barrels during a rare market anomaly, then burying them in the ground is supposed to accomplish what exactly?

Great, you buried 50,000 barrels of crude - congratulations. Now what are you going to do about the 20,000,000 barrels[1] the US will consume tomorrow? Look, oh no, your buried oil leaked into the water table!

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pipelin....

And probably spent more energy transporting and burying that oil than you would have simply burning it or using it... Its insanity how people do not understand the basic principle that any work requires energy. Its why plastic recycling does so poorly, it often more efficient to make new plastic or burn it, than to reprocess it.

It's way more complicated than "the price of oil hit $0".

An option was due, and the holder of the option needed to accept delivery. Because most people who trade in options don't actually want the underlying asset, it was just some trader with no interest in actually owning "oil". It's like if you had barrels of crude oil in your basement; you'd probably let someone pick it up for free too.

But likewise, if you had barrels of crude oil in your basement, then yes you could just let it sit there and never burn it. The trouble is that most people with the ability to accept delivery of industrial quantities of crude oil also want to use it. Also the price rarely dips that low, because the people extracting it do so in order to make money.

> you need regulation

Bingo, except government and industry are so closely related now they resemble a circular human centipede, so we can’t rely on that.

Safety, for one. Technology helps prevent spills.

I don't buy that Microsoft's involvement does much to prevent spills. Exxon, for example, cares about spills mostly as a function of 1) regulation, 2)reputation risk and 3) employees who do care about things being done cleanly. I guess Microsoft's software could maybe enable the employees a bit more, but fundamentally the reasons they are safe have to do with incentives, not technology.

That is not a good faith argument. People who support sustainability want less extraction, not no extraction. Sustainability means extracting less so it is doable over a long period of time.

When the costs of something go up, people and businesses are more eager to explore alternatives.

Driving down the costs of fossil fuels hinders the adoption of alternatives.

I mean, I think there is a reasonable argument here: Microsoft has corporate environmental goals and then as a matter of profit takes money from interests working in direct opposition to those goals. It does smack of hypocrisy, no?

I'd like to debate a few of your other points: "Let's make the extraction of the life blood of all industry on the planet less efficient, less streamlined, less clean." - People often make this argument and I agree: oil is the _current_ life blood of all industry. The oil companies would like to keep it that way and have for years fought a very effective campaign to avoid responsibility for the externalities of oil production and consumption. They have slowed or blocked progress towards a _future_ where oil is not the lifeblood of industry. That is what we really need to get to as a species, don't you agree? There are no physics-based reason why some other technology couldn't power our lives. There are cost-based reasons why oil is currently the winning solution. This only works because we don't price the externalities, the _future_, yet to be paid cost of oil consumption. Fossil fuel companies have stood in the way of progress on renewables and exterality pricing for decades now.

This has big, "you want to criticize capitalism while you buy things with money" energy. Consumers are by in large product takers who have to choose between the products that are on offer. There's no market segment for "same product but without fossil fuels."

I try to avoid buying plastic. Does that mean I don't buy anything made with plastic? No, of course not. That's ridiculous I couldn't buy 90% of products from the grocery store. But when given the opportunity will I pay for an option that doesn't use plastic, yes. It's not the 1800s you don't have to be pure of heart to want to affect positive change.

It's a clear case of all-or-nothing thinking. Calling a CEO's statement "gaslighting" because it implied something does not do anything help their credibility.

Yep. It's genuinely shocking to me that people lack the critical thinking ability to recognize that oil extraction is a function of society as a whole. Oil companies are the ones who get their hands dirty, but society as a whole benefits and encourages the oil extraction. Take factory farming as another example - you can blame the factory farms, but good luck telling the average American they'll have to pay 3x as much for chicken and hamburgers because the animals were treated well.

These are people in said society operating on another part of the whole. They are not idly "blaming", they are attempting to directly increase the cost function to reduce the extraction.

Obviously you disagree with them taking action ("the average American" has to spontaneously demand 3x prices for resistance to be legitimate), but that has nothing to do with a lack of critical thinking ability in your political foes.

> Oil companies are the ones who get their hands dirty, but society as a whole benefits and encourages the oil extraction. Take factory farming as another example - you can blame the factory farms, but good luck telling the average American they'll have to pay 3x as much for chicken and hamburgers because the animals were treated well.

The argument “we’re just doing the dirty work to give you what you want” is horse shit. They actively hid information about climate change for decades, they work to ensure continued subsidies to avoid actual competition, they work to add regulations to competing technologies and run disinformation campaigns. They work to entrench themselves so that “giving you what you want” is really “you’ll take what we give since we’ve undermined the alternatives”.

Same with factory farming. The only reason people think chicken and burgers should be 1/3 the true cost is because the four big ag companies have worked the government into subsidizing things and reducing labour laws, etc etc etc.

Honestly, when your argument starts with being an apologist for big corporations with a profit rather than social motive, I think you should check what first principles you are working with. Our society is a hunger games hellscape and it is because of whatever first principles you are using.

I'm sure they did everything you describe and more. I'm well aware of how corporations externalize costs to increase profit margins, and I'm a huge proponent of stronger regulation and government involvement in corporate day-to-day. It's likely that we would agree on quite a bit. Where we disagree is on the solution to the problems society faces. The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil. This would have profound geo-political implications and would significantly weaken America's standing. Saudi Arabia and Russia will never stop drilling for oil. Like it or not the only way out of this mess is further investment in technologoy and access to energetic resources. The government needs to be subsidizing construction of nuclear power plants in every state of the nation. It needs to be building solar farms all over the western US and hanging high voltage cables from coast to coast. It needs a train network like China. I could go on and on.

> The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil

> Saudi Arabia and Russia will never stop

You are contradicting yourself - either the global economy won’t grind to a halt, because activist is ineffective, or activism is too effective?

The west should be cleaning up its own house and leading by example - instead it has spent decades pointing fingers at China and other countries shouting ‘you first’. Well, guess what, China is now worlds leading user and producer of eclectic cars, has electric busses and most of USA doesn’t. We are the ones behind now, and in fact neither you nor the media have realised it yet.

In the next 2 years it will become clear that the king is banked, and that the leadership is no longer with the west, and I am afraid the consequences for us will be significant. The Sputnik moment has already happened, you just aren’t watching.

> Well, guess what, China is now worlds leading user and producer of eclectic cars, has electric busses and most of USA doesn’t. We are the ones behind now, and in fact neither you nor the media have realised it yet.

The media has realized, unfortunately, hence the latest barrage of complaints about overproduction/dumping. Blinken and Yellen's speeches about that were pathetic.

The US hardly screams at China at all, but China is completely fixated on the US (if media is anything to go by). The US will do things at its own pace like China does, picking at it as a competition is merely a saving face thing that doesn't really exist in the west.

Its only been a decade or so since China had all of those things. You would see multiple obviously imported Tesla Model S's in Beijing way before you saw even one BYD EV taxi. Then China invested in a short period of time and now they have much more than the US. But the time period was so short that China hardly has a moat in these areas.

> In the next 2 years it will become clear that the king is banked, and that the leadership is no longer with the west, and I am afraid the consequences for us will be significant.

We heard this before in the 1980s and that didn't pan out at all. This is just the 1980s again with China in place of Japan; China even has a much bigger real estate bubble than Japan ever did, the consequences will be similar if not worse. The same demographic crash is also coming to China, history is just a broken record.

China has 10x the population and impact of Japan; this is a silly comparison. Japan never had this large share of the world manufacturing

Doesn’t that just make it worse?

> The west should be cleaning up its own house and leading by example - instead it has spent decades pointing fingers at China and other countries shouting ‘you first’

This is inaccurate. The west has been cleaning up its own house and leading by example. While they could and should have done much more, western countries implemented emissions reductions measures long before demanding anyone else do it, and in fact for decades explicitly excluded China as a developing country from having to comply with these agreements.

As a result, western emissions have been declining for decades and, most importantly, became decoupled from GDP growth for the first time in history.

In the meantime China has dramatically surged its emissions, becoming the biggest emitter by far. India and Russia have also increased emissions substantially, becoming the third and fourth highest emitters. In fact, the entire EU now produces fewer carbon emissions than India, and only a little more than Russia.

If current trends continue, before long the top three emitters will be China, India, and Russia, and their trajectories remain worrying.

So any solution that doesn’t encourage those countries to also reduce their emissions is going to doom us all to accelerating climate change.

As for the moral argument, it’s no more moral for China, India, and Russia to emit all the pollution they can than it was when western countries did it. If anything, it’s even more immoral given that better technologies exist and we understand the problem much better.

> As a result, western emissions have been declining for decades and, most importantly

Most of our emission reduction was achieved by outsourcing manufacturing to China. We don’t get an award for that:

> Eu now produces fewer emission than India

Comparison of emissions should be done per capita - India is expected to emit more that EU, it has almost 3x as he population. The he idea that US should be top emitter forever when it’s only 300k people is absurd. Also EU has invested way more into cleantech than US has and has many times more production of these technologies than US does

Lastly - don’t lump Russia together with China and India - China and India are actively developing countries with active leadership. Russia is stagnant and a bit of a failed state. So there is no point of comparing with failed states.

Immorality is irrelevant - we will get rekt economically: EU is, right now, asking China to reduce production of electric cars and complaining that they are unfairly flooding the market

> Most of our emission reduction was achieved by outsourcing manufacturing to China. We don’t get an award for that:

That's a common fallacy and overly simplistic. EU reductions in emissions from power generation, transportation, agriculture, construction, and similar have all been reduced by similar proportions as those from industry.

> Comparison of emissions should be done per capita - India is expected to emit more that EU, it has almost 3x as he population. The he idea that US should be top emitter forever when it’s only 300k people is absurd. Also EU has invested way more into cleantech than US has and has many times more production of these technologies than US does

Even on a per capita level, China emits more per capita than the EU does, and not that much less than the US which is still reducing its per capita emissions, so it will likely surpass it soon. India, for now, emits less, but under current trends will surpass the EU on a per capita basis before long too.

Fact is, both the EU's and US's annual carbon emissions have been trending down for years now, whereas those of China and India continue to point sharply upward. It makes zero sense to focus all the attention and anger on the US and the EU while ignoring what will soon become the world's top emitters.

> Lastly - don’t lump Russia together with China and India - China and India are actively developing countries with active leadership. Russia is stagnant and a bit of a failed state. So there is no point of comparing with failed states.

Russia is one of the world's top five emitters of greenhouse gases, of course it matters.

> Immorality is irrelevant - we will get rekt economically: EU is, right now, asking China to reduce production of electric cars and complaining that they are unfairly flooding the market

I didn't say we should base this on immorality, I'm saying your argument is implicitly based on it and incorrect as a result. What matters is the volume of emissions, and unless we slow down the level of emissions from China, India, Russia, and others forming the top tier of emitters we're not going to be able to meet any good climate targets.

> I'm a huge proponent of stronger regulation and government involvement in corporate day-to-day.

I agree, however we aren’t seeing this in any meaningful fashion, let alone the amount we need to be seeing it to stave off catastrophe. So given this context, I am all for citizen/employee protest in whatever way required to get things to change course.

> It's likely that we would agree on quite a bit. Where we disagree is on the solution to the problems society faces.

I agree with this. Sorry if my last post was a bit aggressive.

> The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil.

I agree with this, but the longer we kick the can down the road, the more urgent the situation becomes and the more drastic the medicine we’ll need to take. So while right now we can possibly get by with a phase out so long as we start getting much more aggressive on renewables, in 20 years we’ll likely be in a “we have to turn off the oil taps immediately” situation. Would’ve been nice if Exxon hadn’t hidden their climate change data in the 60s and given everyone a chance for a peaceful transition. But they didn’t, and so I support everyone refusing to work on energy projects.

Isn't this, then, an example of taking responsibility for the harm caused by fossil fuels? Microsoft benefits from them, in this case, very directly by selling their services for a profit. Wouldn't Microsoft denying fossil fuel companies services be a way to deny benefits (profit) in order to discourage oil extraction?

I don't think anyone involved lacks the critical thinking skills to understand what you laid out - that our society encourages and depends oil extraction. So what's next? How do you move society to discourage and depend less on oil extraction?

It's not Microsoft's job to moralize about what businesses need service. They have no problem giving software to authoritarian murderers around the world by the way, yet they have a problem with providing software to an industry we all desperately need for at least decades to come?

Microsoft should respond by closing their parking lots to all but EVs. I'm SURE that none of the green activist would ever drive an ICE vehicle while protesting big oil...riiight?

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

So then, the oil companies around the world will be able to trivially use Chinese services like Alibaba, further strengthening the Chinese economy at the expense of our own?

China will make the process as efficient as it wants. Remember, we live in a global economy with other players who don’t play by our rules, sanctions or not. And I assure you developing countries are onboard with the idea of oil extraction.

I wonder sometimes to what extent progressives (aka the left, "liberals", leftists, woke, etc.) and their agenda are just paid Chinese operatives and operations or the results of such.

A lot of progressive agendas have ultimately been to China's benefit at the cost of everyone else and especially Pax Americana.

I think most liberals are more anti-conservative values (misogamy, racism, xenophobia, anti-science, anti-education, homophobia, etc.) than pro-progressive policies.

Literally none of what you mentioned has anything to do with conservatism.

Hell, speaking as a Japanese-American (aka a racial minority), conservative people by far have treated me the fairest because they truly don't care about someone's race.

I mean actual conservatism, of course. Not "conservatism" often thrown around in these conversations to label out groups.

So we’re having an economic argument, what does racism or xenophobia have to do with that?

Those dirty liberals, not having blind nationalism and not wanting our government to fuck over another country with 1 billion living human beings just because we don't like their government.

Like good Lord, we're not at war with China. they're one of our biggest trading partners. The idea that we should be doing everything in our power to economically fuck them over isn't the argument you think it is.

"Oh no, we have to supply services to oil companies because if not, a business in China might make a sale?"

Just because you deny that your state is—necessarily—a participant in a global game, doesn't make said game cease to exist.

The other players in the game only benefit from their opponents' state citizens increasingly expressing sentiments of concession.

We are currently in a trade war with China, they are enabling Russia to bypass sanctions, and they are a threat to allies in the region (e.g Taiwan). They are also known for devaluing their currency to harm trade partners and for stealing intellectual property. It may not be a shooting war but we are absolutely in an economic war.

This is one of the few issues with widespread bipartisan consensus (Biden has chosen to keep the China Tariffs that Trump enacted). And yes, China would be glad to take business away from Google. They don’t care about your ethics.

I think you give people too much credit. Simple greed did that to America, it was cheap, dirty work, then more complex work, then high tech work, now coding and the last piece to fall will be r&d because of a simple rug pull.

Apple releases M4 and tsmc rips it off tomorrow. All done on the their (americas) dime because we outsourced the means of production.

As far as this… you got morons quitting their jobs over crap like omg the oil industry is using our cloud. Meanwhile the biggest death machine on the planet e.g. the US government literally has two private azure offerings fully services by Microsoft with dedicated staff, but that’s not sexy, I can’t quit over that and post it in my socials, because that would be unpatriotic. But Microsoft not being green enough for me to work there is a stand that I can brag about.

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