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For a while I've wondered if the math might work out such that the most cost effective way to fight greenhouse gas emissions is simply to buy up and horde oil o

by nullc 7y ago

For a while I've wondered if the math might work out such that the most cost effective way to fight greenhouse gas emissions is simply to buy up and horde oil on the open market. The oil has carbon already trapped in an efficiently storable form, it's absurdly dense, it's quite inexpensive... and buying it up would have a secondary effect of driving up the price, which would incentivize efficiencies and alternatives. Bonus, as a government program it would be more appealing to climate change deniers than alternatives because at the end of the day you'd have oil, which could later be used if we figure out some better solution (or that the problem didn't exist in the first place).

omegaworks 7y ago
Artificially propping up the price of oil won't have the intended effect: It would incentivize the extraction of oil, which at present requires infrastructure that damages the surrounding environment. A lot of the oil is in the ground now because it doesn't make financial sense to extract it; the cost of extraction is less than the revenue generated from its sale on the market. There's plenty of oil hoarded in the ground now in private wells. People sitting on land rights waiting for the right time to sell that oil on the open market. A massive government program that artificially props the price of oil up is the perfect setup for a massive wealth transfer to people that do nothing but hold title. That extracted oil would need to be transported or piped away from the extraction site and stored in perpetuity, all of which the land was already doing for free! Techniques for extraction like fracking destroy the quality of adjacent groundwater and externalizes that cost onto the surrounding community. We don't want a government program that incentivizes poisoning groundwater on a hotter planet with diminishing glacial melt surface water. Planet Money did an excellent series on the crude economy: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet-money-buys-oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...

by nullc 7y ago

omegaworks 7y ago

Artificially propping up the price of oil won't have the intended effect: It would incentivize the extraction of oil, which at present requires infrastructure that damages the surrounding environment. A lot of the oil is in the ground now because it doesn't make financial sense to extract it; the cost of extraction is less than the revenue generated from its sale on the market. There's plenty of oil hoarded in the ground now in private wells. People sitting on land rights waiting for the right time to sell that oil on the open market. A massive government program that artificially props the price of oil up is the perfect setup for a massive wealth transfer to people that do nothing but hold title. That extracted oil would need to be transported or piped away from the extraction site and stored in perpetuity, all of which the land was already doing for free! Techniques for extraction like fracking destroy the quality of adjacent groundwater and externalizes that cost onto the surrounding community. We don't want a government program that incentivizes poisoning groundwater on a hotter planet with diminishing glacial melt surface water. Planet Money did an excellent series on the crude economy: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/planet-money-buys-oil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/26/491342091/plan...