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It's not like the oil is going anywhere, either. I can imagine a point in 30 years where there are new, safer and better ways of getting the oil out, and oil i

It's not like the oil is going anywhere, either. I can imagine a point in 30 years where there are new, safer and better ways of getting the oil out, and oil is necessary for processes that don't involve burning it into the atmosphere, and the price is considerably higher than it is now. I despair of (my current home country) Australia's attitude of digging up all the resources it possibly can and selling them for cheaper than everyone else. And being proud of this, like it's a good thing. These resources are irreplaceable and belong to the whole nation. Maybe leave some in the ground for later when the prices have gone up?

theandrewbailey 8y ago
> These resources are irreplaceable and belong to the whole nation. I'm confused. (Libertarian here) Are mineral rights nationalized in Australia? How do they 'belong' to everyone there, as opposed to the person who owns the ground that those resources are in?
- rohit2412 8y ago
  If the person who owns it is the government, then it belongs to the public.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    Only in an idealized democracy - and democracies don't work that way.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Democracies work any way those who participate in them want them to.
      - jimmy1 8y ago
        I think you were emphasizing the participation part? And I agree, but curious to where do you draw the line on what constitutes participation? Some argue simply paying taxes. Others say it is a list of things perhaps, called "civic duties". Finally, some more extreme believe you have to do it all: attend the town halls, keep up with the times, understand the various debate points, otherwise you are somehow disqualified from playing. (A side note, it has become impossible to keep up with all the ways government affects your life, and this is one of the exact reasons the founders were for limited government. They argued as the responsibilities and roles of government increase, it becomes impossible for the "commoner" to keep up and stay engaged, thus becoming a form of tyranny in of it's own.) I think it's definitely a gray area, but the more participation, obviously, the better, while still somehow maintaining the ability to serve those who participate little just as equally. Otherwise you become a government of some people, not of all people.
      - vraivroo 8y ago
        See, this is the lame kind of pat answer that makes others have to point out that you are being idealistic.
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        The horror /s It’s more healthy than the alternative.
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    A government of the people by the people. Such a wonderful ideal, one I wish more strived towards.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    That's certainly what the government wants you to believe :)
- arethuza 8y ago
  "In general mineral rights in Australia are reserved to the Crown" https://www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/mining-and-mineral-exploration-leases https://www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/mining-a... Which seems as complex as you might expect for something based on similar UK laws: http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsUK/planning/legislation/mineralOwnership.html http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsUK/planning/legislation/mineral... NB I've thought for a while that land 'ownership' is a slightly odd concept - not helped by being in Scotland where land ownership has had over a thousand years to get in a nice mess.
  - vaughnegut 8y ago
    Would have a link or something to look up about Scotland's land rights being a mess? I realize I'm veering a little off topic here, but I'd be curious to learn more. I'd never heard that before
    - arethuza 8y ago
      I can recommend this book if you are are really interested: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14614429-the-poor-had-no-lawyers https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14614429-the-poor-had-no... This Guardian article gives you a flavour of some of the issues: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-land-rights https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-lan...
- pjc50 8y ago
  The land was seized at gunpoint within the past couple of centuries; does that affect your answer?
  - swarnie_ 8y ago
    That's been all of world history for 1300 years, what difference does it make?
    - swish_bob 8y ago
      Are you cool with it happening now? Then maybe it's not right, and maybe it wasn't right before.
      - afiori 8y ago
        What do you propose with regards to that? The concept of historical reparation is in general quite complex, do you think it would be possible here?
        notahacker 8y ago
        The existing solution of the state exploiting mineral rights to non-Aboriginal land and [at least theoretically] distributing their proceeds across the entire population, including those whose access to the land was taken, is probably less suboptimal than regarding mineral rights as 'belonging' to the person who most recently acquired the land title.
      - vraivroo 8y ago
        "right" doesn't enter into it. The people with guns have always made the rules and still do.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  effectively, yes, mineral rights are nationalised. when you buy property in Australia, that does not include the mineral rights on that property, which are a whole separate thing. Farmers have got rich selling access to mine sites, but only the government can sell the mining rights (for the first sale anyway).
- francisofascii 8y ago
  I generally agree with libertarians in that people should not be overly taxed when they create a house or plant a crop. But in this case, the person who owns the land did not create the natural resources. So no, they should not be entitled to it. Also the current public is not entitled to it either. Future generations need to be considered as well.
  - fhbdukfrh 8y ago
    There are actually far more practical reasons for public management of oil and gas resources. The reservoirs are huge and span more than a single owners private property. In order to harvest efficiently you may require coordination or non local maxima decisions to improve overall production. Otherwise you'll leave the majority of the resources in the ground with no way to get them out
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Private entities manage to coordinate across the globe to build hugely complex products, from extraction of resources to manufacturing, assembling, distribution and retailing, and you think reaching an agreement between a few land owners is too much for it?
bryanlarsen 8y ago
Everybody assumes that oil prices are going up. However, there are several large effects that could cause the price of oil to decline. 1. Economics predicts that the price of something will be the same as the price of its cheapest substitute. For a long time, fossil fuels were the substitute, keeping the price of renewables & nuclear down to unprofitable levels. However, renewables, storage and electric cars are all rapidly decreasing in cost, depressing their prices and the prices of their substitutes. 2. Carbon taxes or other similar schemes are looking more likely in the future. They shift the demand/supply curve, causing fewer barrels to be sold at higher prices, but the price doesn't go up enough to cover the full increase, leading to depressed prices before the tax. 3. Economics says that the price of a commodity is the same as the marginal cost of production. In other words, the highest cost producer of oil that meets current demand makes $0 in profit, all lower cost producers make >$0 profit. If demand is low, then that marginal cost is $10 Saudi oil. If demand is high, then that marginal cost is $100 Canadian oilsands oil. So if demand drops because of climate change mitigation and/or renewable substitution and/or electric vehicle substitution, there is supply of lower cost oil, meaning prices can drop. 4. We're not running out of oil, we never have been. As mentioned in #3, the price of oil is the marginal cost of production. Anything that costs more than that price isn't counted in reserves because it's uneconomical to extract. So by definition we always have almost no reserves and never will have. There are trillions of barrels of oil in the Canadian and Venezuelan oil sands alone that aren't counted as reserves for this reason. We're less than 2 price doubling periods away from making this economical, keeping a fairly low ceiling on prices. And of course technology marches on, continually decreasing the price of extracting that oil...
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  P.S. There are still several factors pushing prices up, too.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  > We're not running out of oil, we never have been I mean, there are various ways to define what that means, but oil is getting increasingly expensive to get, alternatives are getting better, we may soon not have much oil left worth getting. and of course we can bicker about what soon means.
SEJeff 8y ago
But isn't Australia (the South at least) doing some serious work around renewable energy and in specific stationary energy storage? https://electrek.co/2017/11/23/tesla-worlds-largest-li-ion-battery-system-in-australia/ https://electrek.co/2017/11/23/tesla-worlds-largest-li-ion-b... https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia-reduced-grid-service-cost/ https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia... And another one: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-virtual-power-plant-south-australia-second-phase/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-virtual-power-plant-south-au... I'd like to think since the land of Oz has a very thin ozone it is great for solar. As the cost of industrial batteries come down, this seems like much more of a sensible future. In the US, battery + solar/wind is just now becoming cheaper than building new coal / natgas peaker plants. This will only continue as the economies of scale and tech improvements drive the cost further down for renewables.
- intothemild 8y ago
  You’d think that we would be all over solar. But the reality is that the power is mostly coal generators, and there’s a huge fat asshole who owns most of the coal. She does everything in her power to make sure that doesn’t happen. Australia had a carbon tax before Gina Reinhardt got rid of it. It was bad for her business. We even had solar panel rebates, they are gone too. There’s no chance we get off coal while she’s alive.
  - discodave 8y ago
    Just a quick fact check: Gina Rinehart, and Hancock Prospecting make most of their money out of iron ore, not coal.
    - fooblitzky 8y ago
      She's still happy to fund plenty of climate change denial and lobbying, e.g. IPA and ANDEV.
    - ggm 8y ago
      That they make most of their money in iron ore doesn't detract from their influence funding pro coal positions. The koch brothers don't limit their lobbying to industry directly relevant to their income
intothemild 8y ago
As an Aussie that’s moved to Norway. I was shocked that the government here in Norway did the smart thing and monopolised the whole industry. Taxes are the same here in Norway as is in Australia, but it’s such a richer country. Everyone treats the oil money with such respect. We know that it came to us, and was temporary and instead of squandering this opportunity, it was done correctly.
- devoply 8y ago
  Canada did the opposite. Canada takes all the oil money for granted and basically has not used it to innovate anything. Instead, it's been drained by a few supposed elite that run oil companies and their cronies. The future of the oil provinces looks bleak.
  - oilman 8y ago
    The attitude of those in the oil industry does not help this at all. I work in oil and talking politics to those I work with just makes me sad. There is a lot of anti-government hate. People are still resentful about the National Energy Program and that ended 30+ years ago. Its kind of a mess. I think its the notion that all the provinces are competing against each other, and that under any oil program some provinces will win and other lose that really holds us back. No one can see that we can all win by collectively working together. It doesn't help at all that there are now moneyed corporate interested involved that are not interested in seeing any changes take place.
    - throw0101a 8y ago
      > People are still resentful about the National Energy Program and that ended 30+ years ago. Its kind of a mess. As someone from Ontario, I wouldn't even care about it being federalized as long as it was better "provincialized": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust... At the very least only payout dividends on a portion of the returns on investment from the fund: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
partiallypro 8y ago
You assume that the ROI of oil will be more in the future. If Australia weren't a top materials producer the entire country would be poorer -now-. That oil money doesn't just evaporate, it reverberates through the entire economy and goes into other goods and services, which also grow. That economic growth will be better for the country, tenfold (and that's playing down the impact,) than just sitting on the oil and waiting for the price to go up...which it may never, due to dwindling demand and alternatives becoming cheaper.
BurningFrog 8y ago
I like the view that keeping the oil in the ground rather than burning it now is an investment. Then again, there is this view: "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." --- Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former Minister of Oil for Saudi Arabia
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  We use vastly more stone today than in the paleolithic// neolithic. The phrase is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
rjf72 8y ago
It's really hard to imagine the scale at which we currently produce oil. In total we produce an average of 80.6 million barrels per day. This doesn't sound like a lot at first but consider that there are 159 liters of oil in a single barrel. When you work this out, it means that we are producing 1.7 liters of crude oil per person, for every man/woman/child on this Earth, per day - every day. Had to double check my math there, because that sounds so absurd. But it's correct! So to visualize that quantity imagine every single man, woman, and child on this entire Earth took a 1.7L beaker (about 5 cans of coke) full of oil, and emptied it out onto the ground. That's how much oil we produce, each and every day. Just stupefying! The problem this reveals is that oil will only be valuable in the longrun if some technology is developed that requires just stupefyingly large quantities of oil. Otherwise, the supply is just far too high. And a catch is that even if this new technology is developed, it's difficult to imagine any usage where 12 billion liters of crude oil per day would not have a massive environmental impact, one way or the other. I would not go long on oil, unless you think it will continue to be used as a primary source of energy generation decades from now.
- imtringued 8y ago
  Those 1.7L don't event cover my commute and I'm using a 40mpg car, not some gas guzzling 20mpg pickup truck.
  - daemin 8y ago
    So it goes to show how many people in the world don't commute to work in the same way or don't even use up their 1.7L "allocation" of oil.
misterman0 8y ago
I fail to see why oil reserves found within a nation's borders belong to them. Why is that oil Australia's do you think? We the people of earth depend on the rainforests of South America. Does that rainforest belong to South Americans? If you think that, please state your reason. I'm so sick of nationalism. Where are all the globalists?
- afthonos 8y ago
  Because that’s pretty much the definition of nation-state: control over a territory and what happens inside it. If you meant to ask why they should belong to the nation states, well, if they belonged to “humanity” someone would still be calling the shots, and there’s no guarantee it would be the Norwegians.
- noselasd 8y ago
  If we abolish nations and go for absolute globalism, who should extract the oil ? Who should decide who gets to extract the oil ? If there's a system to solve those two questions, why is that system better(as you imply it would be) than the current system ?
- robocat 8y ago
  Here's a reason: some small populations like Norway and New Zealand are successfully going greener. This happens in part because our politicians are paying attention to their constituency. It appears to me that many larger countries are not going green (in particular the US climate change denial) and part of the problem is that those at the "top" are very detached from those at the bottom. Why would a single global political entity care more for the median person or the poor person? Care more for a forest, or a global oil company?
gumby 8y ago
I see this attitude as reflecting the "terra nullius" origin of European colonization: Australia is completely empty and undeveloped (as long as we ignore the people who already live here of course!) so there are no consequences of our actions. Plus we're all far away from "civilisation", and nothing we do here interests people "back home" so presumably it doesn't matter what we do. Add to that the unprecedented (truly unprecedented, world wide) growth of the economy (where "growth" is measured only against the things we choose to measure, i.e. GDP) thanks to being a mining colony of China and presto: we're great! A bunch of pollies were along for the ride while Chinese technocrats happened to channel a bunch of cash Australia's way, and decided that they were responsible for "success" they had nothing to do with. Why plan for the future? I live now in the USA where the problems are really really bad. I still have hope that the lucky country will come to its senses. Australia has so much wealth to work with. Compare it to, say, Russia, also a primarily extractive economy: the two countries have roughly the same size of economy but Russia divides it over 5X the number of people, and has if anything an even less diversified, and far more corrupt economy.
elsonrodriguez 8y ago
Yep. One day oil will be too valuable to burn.
sbierwagen 8y ago
>and oil is necessary for processes that don't involve burning it into the atmosphere Modestly unlikely. The need for negative emissions will probably result in producing hydrocarbons from captured atmospheric CO2, which will be expensive, but not as expensive as paying whatever giant carbon tax will be assessed on geological oil.
mcbain 8y ago
To close the loop, maybe Norway could also walk away from drilling for oil off South Australia: https://abc.net.au/news/2019-03-11/great-australian-bight-norwegian-mp-against-oil-drilling/10890322 https://abc.net.au/news/2019-03-11/great-australian-bight-no...
- Tor3 8y ago
  That would have to be Australia's call, as it's Australian territory (I presume). Norway can only walk away from drilling on Norwegian territory, which it did (or will do, nothing has been voted on yet in the parliament). The actual drilling is done by oil companies, and those who wanted to drill in the affected areas in Norway had no intention of any kind of walking.

theandrewbailey 8y ago

> These resources are irreplaceable and belong to the whole nation. I'm confused. (Libertarian here) Are mineral rights nationalized in Australia? How do they 'belong' to everyone there, as opposed to the person who owns the ground that those resources are in?

rohit2412 8y ago
If the person who owns it is the government, then it belongs to the public.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Only in an idealized democracy - and democracies don't work that way.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Democracies work any way those who participate in them want them to.
    - jimmy1 8y ago
      I think you were emphasizing the participation part? And I agree, but curious to where do you draw the line on what constitutes participation? Some argue simply paying taxes. Others say it is a list of things perhaps, called "civic duties". Finally, some more extreme believe you have to do it all: attend the town halls, keep up with the times, understand the various debate points, otherwise you are somehow disqualified from playing. (A side note, it has become impossible to keep up with all the ways government affects your life, and this is one of the exact reasons the founders were for limited government. They argued as the responsibilities and roles of government increase, it becomes impossible for the "commoner" to keep up and stay engaged, thus becoming a form of tyranny in of it's own.) I think it's definitely a gray area, but the more participation, obviously, the better, while still somehow maintaining the ability to serve those who participate little just as equally. Otherwise you become a government of some people, not of all people.
    - vraivroo 8y ago
      See, this is the lame kind of pat answer that makes others have to point out that you are being idealistic.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        The horror /s It’s more healthy than the alternative.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  A government of the people by the people. Such a wonderful ideal, one I wish more strived towards.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  That's certainly what the government wants you to believe :)
arethuza 8y ago
"In general mineral rights in Australia are reserved to the Crown" https://www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/mining-and-mineral-exploration-leases https://www.austrade.gov.au/land-tenure/Land-tenure/mining-a... Which seems as complex as you might expect for something based on similar UK laws: http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsUK/planning/legislation/mineralOwnership.html http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsUK/planning/legislation/mineral... NB I've thought for a while that land 'ownership' is a slightly odd concept - not helped by being in Scotland where land ownership has had over a thousand years to get in a nice mess.
- vaughnegut 8y ago
  Would have a link or something to look up about Scotland's land rights being a mess? I realize I'm veering a little off topic here, but I'd be curious to learn more. I'd never heard that before
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I can recommend this book if you are are really interested: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14614429-the-poor-had-no-lawyers https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14614429-the-poor-had-no... This Guardian article gives you a flavour of some of the issues: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-land-rights https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-lan...
pjc50 8y ago
The land was seized at gunpoint within the past couple of centuries; does that affect your answer?
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  That's been all of world history for 1300 years, what difference does it make?
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    Are you cool with it happening now? Then maybe it's not right, and maybe it wasn't right before.
    - afiori 8y ago
      What do you propose with regards to that? The concept of historical reparation is in general quite complex, do you think it would be possible here?
      - notahacker 8y ago
        The existing solution of the state exploiting mineral rights to non-Aboriginal land and [at least theoretically] distributing their proceeds across the entire population, including those whose access to the land was taken, is probably less suboptimal than regarding mineral rights as 'belonging' to the person who most recently acquired the land title.
    - vraivroo 8y ago
      "right" doesn't enter into it. The people with guns have always made the rules and still do.
marcus_holmes 8y ago
effectively, yes, mineral rights are nationalised. when you buy property in Australia, that does not include the mineral rights on that property, which are a whole separate thing. Farmers have got rich selling access to mine sites, but only the government can sell the mining rights (for the first sale anyway).
francisofascii 8y ago
I generally agree with libertarians in that people should not be overly taxed when they create a house or plant a crop. But in this case, the person who owns the land did not create the natural resources. So no, they should not be entitled to it. Also the current public is not entitled to it either. Future generations need to be considered as well.
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  There are actually far more practical reasons for public management of oil and gas resources. The reservoirs are huge and span more than a single owners private property. In order to harvest efficiently you may require coordination or non local maxima decisions to improve overall production. Otherwise you'll leave the majority of the resources in the ground with no way to get them out
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Private entities manage to coordinate across the globe to build hugely complex products, from extraction of resources to manufacturing, assembling, distribution and retailing, and you think reaching an agreement between a few land owners is too much for it?

bryanlarsen 8y ago

Everybody assumes that oil prices are going up. However, there are several large effects that could cause the price of oil to decline. 1. Economics predicts that the price of something will be the same as the price of its cheapest substitute. For a long time, fossil fuels were the substitute, keeping the price of renewables & nuclear down to unprofitable levels. However, renewables, storage and electric cars are all rapidly decreasing in cost, depressing their prices and the prices of their substitutes. 2. Carbon taxes or other similar schemes are looking more likely in the future. They shift the demand/supply curve, causing fewer barrels to be sold at higher prices, but the price doesn't go up enough to cover the full increase, leading to depressed prices before the tax. 3. Economics says that the price of a commodity is the same as the marginal cost of production. In other words, the highest cost producer of oil that meets current demand makes $0 in profit, all lower cost producers make >$0 profit. If demand is low, then that marginal cost is $10 Saudi oil. If demand is high, then that marginal cost is $100 Canadian oilsands oil. So if demand drops because of climate change mitigation and/or renewable substitution and/or electric vehicle substitution, there is supply of lower cost oil, meaning prices can drop. 4. We're not running out of oil, we never have been. As mentioned in #3, the price of oil is the marginal cost of production. Anything that costs more than that price isn't counted in reserves because it's uneconomical to extract. So by definition we always have almost no reserves and never will have. There are trillions of barrels of oil in the Canadian and Venezuelan oil sands alone that aren't counted as reserves for this reason. We're less than 2 price doubling periods away from making this economical, keeping a fairly low ceiling on prices. And of course technology marches on, continually decreasing the price of extracting that oil...

bryanlarsen 8y ago
P.S. There are still several factors pushing prices up, too.
gameswithgo 8y ago
> We're not running out of oil, we never have been I mean, there are various ways to define what that means, but oil is getting increasingly expensive to get, alternatives are getting better, we may soon not have much oil left worth getting. and of course we can bicker about what soon means.

SEJeff 8y ago

But isn't Australia (the South at least) doing some serious work around renewable energy and in specific stationary energy storage? https://electrek.co/2017/11/23/tesla-worlds-largest-li-ion-battery-system-in-australia/ https://electrek.co/2017/11/23/tesla-worlds-largest-li-ion-b... https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia-reduced-grid-service-cost/ https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia... And another one: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-virtual-power-plant-south-australia-second-phase/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-virtual-power-plant-south-au... I'd like to think since the land of Oz has a very thin ozone it is great for solar. As the cost of industrial batteries come down, this seems like much more of a sensible future. In the US, battery + solar/wind is just now becoming cheaper than building new coal / natgas peaker plants. This will only continue as the economies of scale and tech improvements drive the cost further down for renewables.

intothemild 8y ago
You’d think that we would be all over solar. But the reality is that the power is mostly coal generators, and there’s a huge fat asshole who owns most of the coal. She does everything in her power to make sure that doesn’t happen. Australia had a carbon tax before Gina Reinhardt got rid of it. It was bad for her business. We even had solar panel rebates, they are gone too. There’s no chance we get off coal while she’s alive.
- discodave 8y ago
  Just a quick fact check: Gina Rinehart, and Hancock Prospecting make most of their money out of iron ore, not coal.
  - fooblitzky 8y ago
    She's still happy to fund plenty of climate change denial and lobbying, e.g. IPA and ANDEV.
  - ggm 8y ago
    That they make most of their money in iron ore doesn't detract from their influence funding pro coal positions. The koch brothers don't limit their lobbying to industry directly relevant to their income

intothemild 8y ago

As an Aussie that’s moved to Norway. I was shocked that the government here in Norway did the smart thing and monopolised the whole industry. Taxes are the same here in Norway as is in Australia, but it’s such a richer country. Everyone treats the oil money with such respect. We know that it came to us, and was temporary and instead of squandering this opportunity, it was done correctly.

devoply 8y ago
Canada did the opposite. Canada takes all the oil money for granted and basically has not used it to innovate anything. Instead, it's been drained by a few supposed elite that run oil companies and their cronies. The future of the oil provinces looks bleak.
- oilman 8y ago
  The attitude of those in the oil industry does not help this at all. I work in oil and talking politics to those I work with just makes me sad. There is a lot of anti-government hate. People are still resentful about the National Energy Program and that ended 30+ years ago. Its kind of a mess. I think its the notion that all the provinces are competing against each other, and that under any oil program some provinces will win and other lose that really holds us back. No one can see that we can all win by collectively working together. It doesn't help at all that there are now moneyed corporate interested involved that are not interested in seeing any changes take place.
  - throw0101a 8y ago
    > People are still resentful about the National Energy Program and that ended 30+ years ago. Its kind of a mess. As someone from Ontario, I wouldn't even care about it being federalized as long as it was better "provincialized": * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust... At the very least only payout dividends on a portion of the returns on investment from the fund: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

partiallypro 8y ago

You assume that the ROI of oil will be more in the future. If Australia weren't a top materials producer the entire country would be poorer -now-. That oil money doesn't just evaporate, it reverberates through the entire economy and goes into other goods and services, which also grow. That economic growth will be better for the country, tenfold (and that's playing down the impact,) than just sitting on the oil and waiting for the price to go up...which it may never, due to dwindling demand and alternatives becoming cheaper.

BurningFrog 8y ago

I like the view that keeping the oil in the ground rather than burning it now is an investment. Then again, there is this view: "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." --- Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former Minister of Oil for Saudi Arabia

dredmorbius 8y ago
We use vastly more stone today than in the paleolithic// neolithic. The phrase is vague to the point of meaninglessness.

rjf72 8y ago

It's really hard to imagine the scale at which we currently produce oil. In total we produce an average of 80.6 million barrels per day. This doesn't sound like a lot at first but consider that there are 159 liters of oil in a single barrel. When you work this out, it means that we are producing 1.7 liters of crude oil per person, for every man/woman/child on this Earth, per day - every day. Had to double check my math there, because that sounds so absurd. But it's correct! So to visualize that quantity imagine every single man, woman, and child on this entire Earth took a 1.7L beaker (about 5 cans of coke) full of oil, and emptied it out onto the ground. That's how much oil we produce, each and every day. Just stupefying! The problem this reveals is that oil will only be valuable in the longrun if some technology is developed that requires just stupefyingly large quantities of oil. Otherwise, the supply is just far too high. And a catch is that even if this new technology is developed, it's difficult to imagine any usage where 12 billion liters of crude oil per day would not have a massive environmental impact, one way or the other. I would not go long on oil, unless you think it will continue to be used as a primary source of energy generation decades from now.

imtringued 8y ago
Those 1.7L don't event cover my commute and I'm using a 40mpg car, not some gas guzzling 20mpg pickup truck.
- daemin 8y ago
  So it goes to show how many people in the world don't commute to work in the same way or don't even use up their 1.7L "allocation" of oil.

misterman0 8y ago

I fail to see why oil reserves found within a nation's borders belong to them. Why is that oil Australia's do you think? We the people of earth depend on the rainforests of South America. Does that rainforest belong to South Americans? If you think that, please state your reason. I'm so sick of nationalism. Where are all the globalists?

afthonos 8y ago
Because that’s pretty much the definition of nation-state: control over a territory and what happens inside it. If you meant to ask why they should belong to the nation states, well, if they belonged to “humanity” someone would still be calling the shots, and there’s no guarantee it would be the Norwegians.
noselasd 8y ago
If we abolish nations and go for absolute globalism, who should extract the oil ? Who should decide who gets to extract the oil ? If there's a system to solve those two questions, why is that system better(as you imply it would be) than the current system ?
robocat 8y ago
Here's a reason: some small populations like Norway and New Zealand are successfully going greener. This happens in part because our politicians are paying attention to their constituency. It appears to me that many larger countries are not going green (in particular the US climate change denial) and part of the problem is that those at the "top" are very detached from those at the bottom. Why would a single global political entity care more for the median person or the poor person? Care more for a forest, or a global oil company?

gumby 8y ago

I see this attitude as reflecting the "terra nullius" origin of European colonization: Australia is completely empty and undeveloped (as long as we ignore the people who already live here of course!) so there are no consequences of our actions. Plus we're all far away from "civilisation", and nothing we do here interests people "back home" so presumably it doesn't matter what we do. Add to that the unprecedented (truly unprecedented, world wide) growth of the economy (where "growth" is measured only against the things we choose to measure, i.e. GDP) thanks to being a mining colony of China and presto: we're great! A bunch of pollies were along for the ride while Chinese technocrats happened to channel a bunch of cash Australia's way, and decided that they were responsible for "success" they had nothing to do with. Why plan for the future? I live now in the USA where the problems are really really bad. I still have hope that the lucky country will come to its senses. Australia has so much wealth to work with. Compare it to, say, Russia, also a primarily extractive economy: the two countries have roughly the same size of economy but Russia divides it over 5X the number of people, and has if anything an even less diversified, and far more corrupt economy.

elsonrodriguez 8y ago

Yep. One day oil will be too valuable to burn.

sbierwagen 8y ago

>and oil is necessary for processes that don't involve burning it into the atmosphere Modestly unlikely. The need for negative emissions will probably result in producing hydrocarbons from captured atmospheric CO2, which will be expensive, but not as expensive as paying whatever giant carbon tax will be assessed on geological oil.

mcbain 8y ago

To close the loop, maybe Norway could also walk away from drilling for oil off South Australia: https://abc.net.au/news/2019-03-11/great-australian-bight-norwegian-mp-against-oil-drilling/10890322 https://abc.net.au/news/2019-03-11/great-australian-bight-no...

Tor3 8y ago
That would have to be Australia's call, as it's Australian territory (I presume). Norway can only walk away from drilling on Norwegian territory, which it did (or will do, nothing has been voted on yet in the parliament). The actual drilling is done by oil companies, and those who wanted to drill in the affected areas in Norway had no intention of any kind of walking.