EU countries want oil exploration to be classed as a green investment | Hacker News Reader

EU countries want oil exploration to be classed as a green investment

politico.eu

26 pointsaleda14510 comments

This is just days after EU courts ruled private jet construction counts as a "green investment": https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-court-says-p...

Isn't it green investment as well if I chop only green trees and evergreens? Also I use to store raw oil only in green containers. That's green living. Right?

Nobody thinks oil is "green".

It's just that suddenly no energy source is below them and they've made so many stupid rules over the years that the only way to drill for oil without getting stopped by bureaucracy spaghetti is to use some doublespeak to redefine it as green.

Not that that isn't alarming and stupid on all sorts of levels, but it's a different problem than just waking up one day and thinking oil is green.

Well oil is "green". Burning oil releases carbon dioxide which is plant food and contributes to global greening. This isn't good, because it also contributes to global warming, but I don't really understand why people conflate "green" with renewables. The greenest the planet has ever been was during the carboniferous period, where plants had feasted on unusually high levels of atmospheric co2.

The color green has long been symbolically associated with environmentalist political causes, because the earliest environmentalist concerns were about literally-green plants being replaced by human-made machinery that is typically brown and grey. The fact that, today, the biggest environmentalist political concern is atmospheric CO2, and the fact that one effect of larger amounts of atmospheric CO2 is literally more green, photosynthesizing plant life, is a true enough fact; but not really relevant to the color symbolism.

Exactly! The best way we can make the world green again is to make Florida an underwater reef.

Oil is usually clear or light yellow.

It can be darker colors too.

Yeah, oil exploration is clearly not what the people who originally set up the rules for "green transition" investment funds had in mind. But my own position is that ensuring that humanity as maximal access to energy, even if it's fossil fuel-based energy right now, is the most effective long-term way to ensure human flourishing and also achieve environmentalist goals. So I've never cared about investing my own money in investment funds that have inclusion rules based on the "green transition", and I don't really care if the formal rules for those funds are getting severely bent, because I never supported any investment philosophy that limited itself to investment in funds formally-classified as "green transition" funds to begin with.

What does "human flourishing" mean? And why do you want humans to have maximal access to energy? (what I'm getting at is, what story of humanity matters to you?)

I want humanity to have the power to radically reshape the uncaring physical world to suit the needs and desires of individual humans. This requires harnessing as much energy as possible (as well as having the technological capacity to direct that energy towards ends that benefit human beings).

Harnessing as much energy as possible entails making use of energy resources much in excess of what's available via fossil fuel exploration; we should be thinking on the scale of massive solar panel arrays in space beaming immense amounts of power to Earth, the sort of structures that are plausibly the beginning of a Dyson sphere. Also, with prodigious amounts energy available, lots of ways of directly controlling the amount of atmospheric CO2 become unlocked, that are currently prohibitively expensive, and this solves climate change as well as a host of other human problems.

But we're nowhere near that point yet, and humanity still does need fossil fuels to power the current economy, which is the same economy that is leading us towards that energy-abundant goal. I don't want to unnecessarily delay a future where we're harnessing all the power of the sun, by prematurely forestalling energy use using less desirable fossil fuels right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com