'Carbon Bubble' Could Spark Global Financial Crisis, Study Warns (theguardian.com) 283
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The existence of a "carbon bubble" -- assets in fossil fuels that are currently overvalued because, in the medium and long-term, the world will have to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- has long been proposed by academics, activists and investors. The new study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that a sharp slump in the value of fossil fuels would cause this bubble to burst, and posits that such a slump is likely before 2035 based on current patterns of energy use. Crucially, the findings suggest that a rapid decline in fossil fuel demand is no longer dependent on stronger policies and actions from governments around the world. Instead, the authors' detailed simulations found the demand drop would take place even if major nations undertake no new climate policies, or reverse some previous commitments. That is because advances in technologies for energy efficiency and renewable power, and the accompanying drop in their price, have made low-carbon energy much more economically and technically attractive.
Not so fast (Score:5, Interesting)
Crucially, the findings suggest that a rapid decline in fossil fuel demand is no longer dependent on stronger policies and actions from governments around the world.
This dangerous trend can and will be stopped: We will use a combination of tariffs, executive orders and obscure WWII-era federal statutes to nationalize the energy sector and stamp out this "change" nonsense, ensuring that fossil fuel jobs in key voting districts will endure for decades to come!
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Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Informative)
That will make sense circa 2022. look at how many car companies are investing heavily in EV's.
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This.
And there will be a drawn out period of intense competition. If I live in a sunny area and have my roof covered with solar panels, the EV will make so much sense because my fuel will be essentially free. If I live in a remote village in a cloudy, low sun exposure location where I need to be able to rely on travelling long distances, I might opt to keep the ICE engine and accept the fuel expense (that may or may not have lowered due to less demand).
The idea that there will be a sudden collapse and swi
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Volkswagen has spent billions developing a new electric-first platform and plan on rolling it out over the next couple of years. Every car maker plans on releasing at least one, if not three to five models by the date he stated. The cost of maintaining electric vehicles is already at parity with gas vehicles, and pretty much everyone agrees that the cost of batteries (big maintenance item, usually 50% of the value of the car at the 10 year mark) and cost of maintenance will continue to drop.
Gas and
Re:Not so fast (Score:5, Insightful)
Peak Oil (Score:3, Funny)
Dont worry, peak oil should cancel it out nicely ;)
(for the idiots, yes, joking, get a sense of humor.....)
Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's a joke, really. There's been no lack of demand for oil, and it's doubtful that this is going to change any time soon. Peak oil may well hit us first.
Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't expect there to be a sudden transition either. Even if demand for oil starts to drop, prices will drop even harder, and that makes it less attractive to switch to electric.
Re:Peak Oil (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is volatility. These things don't happen in nice, smooth supply/demand curves. Even a 2% drop in demand would wreak havoc on the market... as some suppliers go offline (or bankrupt) the price spikes again, and you get a yoyo effect that could spiral out of control. The "light tight" oil coming out of these fracking plays is not a drop-in replacement for West Texas crude, it's a different product with very different economics -- with EROEI [wikipedia.org] in the single digits, and most producers leveraged to the gills, not covering much more than their operating costs, even at $60/bbl. The whole business is a house of cards.
Re: Peak Oil (Score:2)
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Sorry, I was unclear there... I meant a persistent drop of 2%, not a temporary fluctuation.
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Which means a surplus of used ICE cars. Combined with cheaper oil, that makes it an attractive option for people with small budgets.
Re: Peak Oil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Peak Oil (Score:5, Informative)
There's still a lot of cheap oil with low extraction cost, but the market price of oil is determined by the most expensive barrel, not the average. As demand drops just a little bit, these expensive barrels are taken out of the equation, and price will drop quickly.
Re: Peak Oil (Score:2)
Oil price isn't really driven by supply or futures of. It's driven by demand. Even in OPECs good old days, they didn't have much control over the selling price. They were just a good group to blame for it.
Now a days with Russia & Venezuela pumping out oil to prop up their economies and the US having quick and easy access to natural gas; controlling the barrel price via production has been very difficult. If anything, the price is driving production. If price goes high, more oil comes into the market.
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But there will also be plenty of used EVs, and they are a much more attractive purchase. Next to no maintenance and "fuel" is extremely cheap or even free.
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But, won't most of those used EV's...be at the age where they will need battery replacements, which are generally very $$$$$....?
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A Leaf looks good for about 400k km on the original pack, and Tesla maybe 1.5M km. Basically the bodywork will fall off it before the battery needs replacing, unless there is a fault with the pack. And used packs won't be expensive either, in fact used Leaf packs are not bad right now. In the future there will be refurbs too.
Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, the oil age won't end because we run out of oil.
Mod parent up - twice! (Score:2)
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, the oil age won't end because we run out of oil.
What a GREAT sound bite. That deserves both an "insightful" and a "funny".
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Mass starvation/war on a scale never before seen.
Something tells me people are or will be working on other ways to make fertilizer. Failing that, there are other ways to make oil.
Also according to these sources fertilizer is made not using oil but natural gas:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... [forbes.com]
https://grist.org/article/2010... [grist.org]
In fact, fossil carbon emissions are still rising. (Score:2)
There's been no lack of demand for oil, and it's doubtful that this is going to change any time soon.
In fact (as a later item on the slashdot front page today notes):
The World Set a New Record For Renewable Power in 2017, But Emissions [of oil and gas sourced carbon dioxide] Are Still Rising [slashdot.org].
This is because energy demands rose faster than deployment of renewable energy sources to supply them, and fossil fuel energy is still cheap.
I expect renewable energy generation to catch up with demand gr
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Crucially, the findings suggest that a rapid decline in fossil fuel demand is no longer dependent on stronger policies and actions from governments around the world.
This dangerous trend can and will be stopped: We will use a combination of tariffs, executive orders and obscure WWII-era federal statutes to nationalize the energy sector and stamp out this "change" nonsense, ensuring that fossil fuel jobs in key voting districts will endure for decades to come!
What an odd conclusion. Maybe it's because you accidentally forgot to quote the next sentence:
That is because advances in technologies for energy efficiency and renewable power, and the accompanying drop in their price, have made low-carbon energy much more economically and technically attractive.
If that's true, then you have nothing to worry about. The economic incentives will win out.
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Something seems wrong here... (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you do that? The cost of a fair amount of energy(and often a lot of petrochemicals that will presumably be cheaper if less demand for using them as fuel means lower cost for purchasing them as feedstocks) is baked into pretty much every good and service imaginable. What sort of ghastly mistake does it take to turn "basically everything has become cheaper to produce" into a financial crisis?
Because people aren't rational (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, imagine what's gonna happen when the price of oil gets low enough that the middle eastern countries can't afford to keep up their militaries and their social welfare programs. Don't fo
Re:Because people aren't rational (Score:5, Insightful)
The sane thing to do is to provide aid to modernize these countries.
You can't modernize an old mindset of tribal warfare with aid.
Sure you can (Score:2)
TL;DR: It's cheaper to drop food than bombs.
Re:Because people aren't rational (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the aforementioned countries' rulers should spend some of their petrodollars on something other than super-yachts and building decorative islands at which to moor them?
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Iran TRIED to get some nuclear power plants built to reduce their reliance on oil for their power. The US and others all screamed murder and had sanctions put on them after the US, France and Russia had all cancelled contracts to build nuclear plants in Iran and the Iranians decided to just build their own, including processing their own nuclear fuel !
And yet, a brutal regime like Saudi is apparently "ok" to have nuclear power ?
Venezuela did (Score:2)
The Saudis see this coming, btw. It's why they're letting women drive. They're trying to get them into the workforce to keep their economy growing.
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Yeah, that's the theory, isn't it.
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* Venezuela began struggling when oil was at 110$ a barrel.It's the incompetent regime that is at fault (incompetent because even other 'socialist' dictatorships manage to have toilet paper available).
* Middle East oil-based countries already survived 8$ a barrel in the 1980s.
* No ME country has nukes save for Israel, which is not an oil exporter.
* ME countries cannot be modernized from outside. But we can stop the nastier countries from doing (more) trouble and getting nukes, which would be really bad for
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Re: Because people aren't rational (Score:3)
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Venezuela is what real socialism looks like when properly executed and given no opposition forces.
Really, it's not.
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That is the most ludicrous retelling of Venezuela's recent history I've ever heard. Thanks for the chuckle.
"....some of those wounds were self inflicted..." Some?
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Israel does though they won't admit it. I haven't heard of anyone else in the Middle East having nukes.
Re:Something seems wrong here... (Score:4, Interesting)
If those financial indicators are predicated on the stability and reliability of the US dollar,
The petrodollar system elevated the U.S. dollar to the world's reserve currency and through this status, the U.S. is able to enjoy persistent trade deficits, and become a global economic hegemony. The petrodollar system also provides the United States’ financial markets with a source of liquidity and foreign capital inflows through petrodollar "recycling."
-- How Petrodollars Affect The U.S. Dollar [investopedia.com].
it could be more than a trifle off. How much, though, I don't know enough to say.
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No rail to a mine, no new mine, no US citizens finding mineral wealth and exporting the raw materials.
A car park and a forest is what the USA sets aside.
That allows a US company to extract the raw materials for cents in the $ from an Asia, Africa, South America.
No pollution in the USA. No tailings dam. No new rail road up into Alaska to open up new mines.
The USA never used a lot of its ener
Re:Something seems wrong here... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the cost of the primary energy that will upset the economy. It is the cost of the disposal of assets, the sunk investments, the many jobs supported, etc. It isn't about newer and cheaper, it's about too big to fail actually failing and also being too big to prop up.
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On the nose. In fact, the economy usually booms when energy prices go down. There is no kind of economic stimulus quite like it. It puts money in the pockets of average consumers AND money in the pockets of most productive businesses. (Not all, of course.)
As one factor analysis goes, I do not think you can do better than look at the correlation between average energy prices one year to economic growth in the following year. Better than tax cuts/rises, military spending increases/decreases, which party
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Lower prices for a product tend to yield less income for the producers of that product. And when that product's responsible for 90% or more of your country's income...
C'mon, this is not exactly rocket science we're needing to do here.
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It seems likely the unit of measure you're citing is barrel and there are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, but the point is salient.
In the US, the break even point for existing wells is probably around $20 per barrel, depending on the company and the well's location; although a drop in price to even $30-35 bbl would all but halt new drilling exploits.
Nations with fewer environmental concerns and lower wages might get closer to $10-15 a bbl cost, but there certainly is a point at which oil & gas recovery
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Texas pretty much leads the nation in wind energy [awea.org] generation.
Sure, there's still a healthy oil extraction economy, but oil is a finite resource, and we'll all move past it eventually.
Technology and new extraction techniques for tight oil have prolonged the petroleum economy, much the same way innovations in agriculture have prolonged the inevitable human overpopulation disaster, but the can hasn't been kicked that far down the road.
EROI Will burst the carbon bubble (Score:2, Informative)
I've read that a mix of lower Energy Reruns On Investment (EROI) I.E higher energy inputs to extract carbon fuels (one barrel of light crude equivalent) and lower ore grades for mining raw materials (more energy to move more rock for less ore) will cause the bubble to burst eventually.
But the true wildcard is the adoption or non carbon energy sources and how much of a market share it will take from carbon fuel sources.
Worse case scenario, carbon fuel EROI will be very low I.E high extraction costs. In a
No Economic Information (Score:2)
Well (Score:2)
Laws of economics (Score:2)
Price goes up, people can no longer afford it, demand goes down.
The price of petroleum products will only ever keep going up (on average). Humanity won't stop burning oil until there's none left to burn.
Yap. Yap. Yap. More doomer porn and oil scare BS (Score:2)
Wrong bubble (Score:2)
Nope. The bubble is people's interest in climate change. People aren't giving a sh*t about it because they have come to the realization that solving it is too expensive for them.
everywhere and forever magic wand (Score:2)
There's a basic stupidity here. By implied extrapolation, the PR wonks are trying to lump energy technology in with Moore's law, as it applies to silicon: a die shrink only ever gets better (which itself is barely true any more, though it certainly enjoyed a stellar half century).
Environmental energy is not
Skeptical that this will be a big deal (Score:2)
A crash in fossil fuel prices will certainly be disruptive, but it takes more than just disruption to cause a major financial crash.
Certainly many specific areas will face some pretty severe consequences from such a crash. States where fossil fuel exports make up a large fraction of their economy, such as Alaska or North Dakota, will be hit pretty severely. Nations that are doing similar, such as Saudi Arabia, will get it even worse. But most countries and areas are likely to sail through without dire co
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A crash in fossil fuel prices will certainly be disruptive, but it takes more than just disruption to cause a major financial crash.
Certainly many specific areas will face some pretty severe consequences from such a crash. States where fossil fuel exports make up a large fraction of their economy, such as Alaska or North Dakota, will be hit pretty severely. Nations that are doing similar, such as Saudi Arabia, will get it even worse. But most countries and areas are likely to sail through without dire consequences.
What could cause such a crash to turn into something like the 2007-2008 crash is debt: debt magnifies crashes. That's the reason why the housing bubble had such severe consequences: houses are typically debt-financed. The question, then, is how much of fossil fuel investment is leveraged, and where is that debt held? The answer to that question will determine whether there are wider consequences beyond oil-exporting areas.
Granted, the consequences within oil-exporting areas could be extremely severe if it triggers wars. Which is definitely a possibility in some such areas.
Historically, low energy prices usually lead to economic growth.
This is a pretty silly article. As the price drops high-cost producers will stop producing. If the demand outstrips the supply from the low-cost producers the price will rise, making higher-cost production more viable.
Here's an article on production costs: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/2... [cnn.com]
Frackers have a huge advantage in that they can shut down and start up very quickly, certainly much more quickly than deep water drillers.
Who cares? (Score:2)
A few dozen billionaires become millionaires, a few millionaires go bust and thousands of employees head for the solar and wind industry.
It has happened before, the world didn't end.
Re:"that such a slump is likely before 2035" (Score:4, Insightful)
That's just a guess.
For many of you, this slump will happen right before you retire, crushing your savings and forcing you to stay in the working world, with now-shittier pay and even fewer job prospects.
But you are the lucky ones.
For me, it will happen just a few years after I have already retired, let my skills rust and myself age to the point of being unemployable....now with no passive income to speak of and no job prospects at all. And the costly medical issues that come with age.
The world is an unkind place.
Re:"that such a slump is likely before 2035" (Score:5, Insightful)
You expect a collapse in energy prices and the massive availability of cheap energy to negatively effect industrial economies ?
So that would be like the economic disasters that came about when people started burning coal for steam power or oil for the internal combustion engine, And electrification destroyed the worlds economy ?
Re:"that such a slump is likely before 2035" (Score:5, Informative)
You expect a collapse in energy prices and the massive availability of cheap energy to negatively effect industrial economies ?
No. He expects it to negatively effect the financial world which has a lot riding on the traditional energy users. Too big to fail is such due to the impact the failure itself has on the economy. Industry itself will be doing just fine as will the general economy. The fewer job prospects isn't really anything to do with the number of jobs as much as the competition.
Also your comparisons to the switch to coal and oil isn't quite fair. The coal and oil for its most part provided new opportunities rather than replacing existing ones. Buggy whip manufacturers aside the world economy wasn't propped up by people selling horses and hay. The same can not be said for the trillions of of dollars sitting in the oil industry. We are talking about active replacement / destruction of industries as the end goal now. Expect it to be quite different from the steam age.
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You expect a collapse in energy prices and the massive availability of cheap energy to negatively effect industrial economies ?
No. He expects it to negatively effect the financial world which has a lot riding on the traditional energy users.
Won't someone think of the Koch Brothers!
Now let's say that in order to avoid this collapse because of shifting to renewables - and a big thanks to the Guardian for alerting us to this truth - we decide to make all alternative energy sources illegal, That in order to sustain civilization - we must force coal, oil and gas.
So is the supply of the three energy sources that are keeping us from global collapse infinite? Should we just fold the tents and pray for the rapture?
Yes - if we get some stubborn f
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Traditional energy sources are predicted to drop in value, as many things will have moved to using alternative energy sources. By 2035 i imagine fossil fuel cars will no longer be in production, with fuel being available as a niche for classic car enthusiasts.
So sure you might be able to buy gasoline cheaply, but it won't be of any use to most people. Most industry similarly will have moved on to newer sources of energy.
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Can I have some of what you are smoking? There is no way fossil fuel cars are going away by 2035. Even if the necessary energy storage and packaging issues are solved and electric cars become entirely feasible to replace gasoline and diesel, the electric grid cannot handle that hand off and it will take more than 17 years to add the infrastructure necessary to deliver that amount of energy much less produce it.
Re: "that such a slump is likely before 2035" (Score:2)
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Can I have some of what you are smoking? There is no way fossil fuel cars are going away by 2035.
God will provide us with all of the oil we need. It will fall like manna from the heavens.
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Man, here in Norway electric cars are almost 2/3 of all new vehicles already (half battery, the other half hybrids, mostly plug-in). Range is already more than enough for anyone who is not a taxi driver or otherwise drives all day long. Calculations by DNV GL indicate that EVs will be overall cheaper than fossil-fuelled card by 2022, that's before you factor in extra taxes on pollution or subsidies on zero emissions. It's true that their up-front cost is higher, but maintenance and energy are way cheaper, s
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I wonder if after the oil collapse, biogas will become more attractive for those people still running a petroleum powered engine.
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There's actually a really good reason to think it COULD happen before 2035. Autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles (EV) have a great synergy together (A-EV), which would drive the adoption of both far faster than one would expect. The short version is that autonomous vehicles allow the reduction of automobile stocks by about a factor of 10, due to primarily to heavier re-use as part of an autonomous transportation network, as well as more efficient use patterns (for instance, it'd make "carpooling" to wo
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I doubt electric only will out sell or produce gasoline only production by 2035. I agree that hybrids are likely to gain a lot of traction, but I see the split being more like 15:60:25 for passenger vehicles. The cheap end of cars is going to be gasoline only for a long while considering the cost of batteries and that's a good amount of volume. People on a tight budget are unlikely to invest more capital up front to reduce fuel costs over the life of the vehicle. Also, pickup trucks are unlikely to transiti
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The average age of cars in the US is something like 12 or 15 years, and rising. In 2035 the average car may be from 2018 or earlier, and then there are all the cars above average in age. Gasoline will still be available everywhere, because there will still be millions of gas powered cars on the road, regardless of what is being produced new.
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Traditional energy sources are predicted to drop in value, as many things will have moved to using alternative energy sources. By 2035 i imagine fossil fuel cars will no longer be in production, with fuel being available as a niche for classic car enthusiasts.
So sure you might be able to buy gasoline cheaply, but it won't be of any use to most people. Most industry similarly will have moved on to newer sources of energy.
Here's the IEA world energy outlook which takes into account likely policies.
https://www.globalenergyinstit... [globalener...titute.org] ... gy-outlook
"Global Demand Growth: Energy demand between 2015 and 2040 is expected to grow by a bit more than 28%, or 3,770 million tons oil equivalent (mtoe) worldwide. All of the increase in global demand—in fact, more than all (about 3,922 mtoe or 104%) of it—will come from non-Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (i.e., developing countries). IEA
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You expect a collapse in energy prices and the massive availability of cheap energy to negatively effect industrial economies ?
So that would be like the economic disasters that came about when people started burning coal for steam power or oil for the internal combustion engine, And electrification destroyed the worlds economy ?
Exactly.
As well, the article seems to neglect the real worldwide collapse if we simply decided to ride fossil fuels to the point that supply simply peters out and becomes so limited and expensive that there isn't enough to support civlization. It appears they believe that the supply of coal and oil are infinite.
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Well the supply of fossil fuels or any kind of fuel is hardly infinite, but hydrocarbon fuels are indefinitely available
https://www.betterworldsolutio... [betterworldsolutions.eu]
If you are going to force people to sequester carbon you might as well do it as diesel.
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Well the supply of fossil fuels or any kind of fuel is hardly infinite, but hydrocarbon fuels are indefinitely available
https://www.betterworldsolutio... [betterworldsolutions.eu]
If you are going to force people to sequester carbon you might as well do it as diesel.
Of all the cacahead things, concepts that make using food stocks to produce fuel look like prudent and sensible strokes of genius, using the very element that allows the earth to have some temperate climate areas - removing carbon dioxide to allow coal rolling is as good an idea as using Brawndo with electrolytes - it's what plants crave.
The earth would have an average temperature below freezing if not for carbon dioxide. This gas is critical for life on earth.
So now these tools propose turning atmosph
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Like I give a shit what will happen in 2035!
Like I give a shit what a group of academics predicts will happen financially in 2035. Even famed economists can't predict what is coming in the next 5 years.
Re: "that such a slump is likely before 2035" (Score:2, Funny)
Speaking of bubbles that are going to burst...
Re: "that such a slump is likely before 2035" (Score:2)
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Re:Every energy company (Score:4)
Saudi Arabia has been investing in nuclear power as well. Electric vehicles are only useful in reducing domestic use of oil if they have sources of electricity that do not depend on burning oil to produce. I know that people will claim that electric cars will use less oil per mile even if the oil is burned to produce electricity, because a central power plant is more efficient in converting oil burned to miles traveled. You know what burns even less oil per mile than an electric vehicle charged from an oil fired power plant? One charged from nuclear power.
I know that Saudi Arabia has lots of sun, and is building solar collectors to produce electricity. They did the math just like anyone else can do, solar power will not provide the electricity they need. The only solution they have is to build nuclear power or face an impending energy crisis.
Right now Saudi Arabia burns 1/3rd of the oil they produce to meet domestic energy needs. Whatever they don't burn domestically they can sell to foreign markets. While electric cars are great in reducing oil burned for transportation there is no alternative right now for making planes fly. When it comes to shipping there have been three modes of power that have been shown successful at some point in the past, wind, oil, and nuclear fission. Wind powered shipping hasn't been profitable for about a century now. Oil fired shipping is the norm, and will likely remain so for some time. There's been experimentation in civilian ships powered by nuclear fission in the past and the results were mixed. Military ships powered by a nuclear reactor are obviously a thing but the cost/benefit calculation on that is very different.
Electric cars and solar panels will get us only so far. Barring some leap in technology the future looks bright for nuclear power to take over for when oil gets too expensive. This switch to nuclear power will happen at some point. It will be because oil prices get high enough to exceed the cost of producing energy from nuclear reactors, or because we've advanced nuclear fission technology to the point its price fell to below that from oil. I expect both will be a factor in the switch over.
Oh, and as best I can tell many energy companies have been focusing on one kind of energy to produce. The big oil companies did at one time invest a lot into solar power but that had problems. One problem is that making solar collectors and drilling for oil called for very different skill sets and markets. This meant solar power tended to distract from oil production or oil production distracted from making solar collectors, its difficult for any one company to be good at both. Another problem was more political. Governments did not like the idea of companies getting a monopoly on energy, so companies that in the past only focused on drilling for oil would have to defend their practice of buying up the competition. This was also a political problem for investors and customers. Customers would accuse oil companies of holding up the competition by holding patents and other intellectual property for making solar collectors. Investors also saw a company that was developing solar power and oil as a bad investment because their investments would be devalued if either oil or solar power took a dive, they preferred holding stock in one or the other.
We'll see BP advertise itself as being "Beyond Petroleum", as one example, but they are still focusing on liquid fuels, like ethanol and bio-diesel. Even so the haters will simply claim such investments by BP and other companies that deal in petroleum is just "greenwashing". Well, haters are going to hate. Such investments don't gain them any favors from the anti-oil crowd and bring scrutiny from government regulators.
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Solar and wind are already the cheapest, and are STILL falling in price. Nuclear, however
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>when oil gets too expensive
Solar and wind are already the cheapest, and are STILL falling in price. Nuclear, however ...
Solar and wind are nowhere close to the bottom for oil. Solar and wind are cheaper just because the demand for oil is high. If the demand drops like this article predicts, then price will also continue to drop. Some of the cheapest oil can still be extracted for under $10 a barrel. Solar and wind have a long ways to go before they can compete with $10 oil. We will likely stay in an equilibrium for a long time to come and as solar and wind drop, the price of oil drops with it. This does mean that the
Re:Every energy company (Score:4, Interesting)
Saudi Arabia jumped the gun on nuclear and it doesn't look like a good investment any more. When they selected it there wasn't much of a grid scale battery storage market and it seemed like it might be a long way off. Now solar+battery costs about half as much per megawatt as nuclear does, and works much better in terms of reacting to demand.
Even worse, they are buying in the nuclear tech (some from France, some from Japan and some from South Korea) and don't have any capability to produce fuel themselves. They missed an opportunity to become leaders in solar+battery tech and export it, rather than being reliant on technology and fuel imports.
To be fair it was harder to see back when they made the decision to build $80bn of nuclear generation, but it's also not too late to pivot away from it.
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The cost to design Clean, ATOMIC Energy was not a low cost.
That ATOMIC energy then had to sell for less than hydro, coal, oil, gas, later solar and wind to stay in demand.
Then the US fuel cycle was different and had to look after its waste on site.
All the new security, storage, upgrades, spare parts, new computers, next germination of staff wit
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They are Communist. They don't have to care.
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Re:First "Peak Oil" and now this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who remembers being told we are heading into a new ice age?
Sigh. In the 1970s, some people in the media claimed that there would be an ice age; scientists were in fact already talking about global warming https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm [skepticalscience.com].
Why do we pay attention to this crap. It's just like a new fad diet.
Because this "crap" happens to be pretty accurate and pretty concerning. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com], and look at changing sea ice levels http://nsidc.org/sites/nsidc.org/files/images/cryosphere/sotc/arctic-antarctic-anomaly-trend-1978-2017.png [nsidc.org] http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html [nsidc.org].
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Current batteries are also dangerous, there have been numerous cases of lithium batteries exploding.
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nope, developing 3rd world will eat that stuff up.
burn baby burn