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I think it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change and any changes we enact to counteract it. We should work from a

• danmaz74 7y ago
  I'm afraid this is going to be true, unless some other far cheaper source of energy is going to be developed. On the other hand, the rate at which that oil is going to be burned is very relevant for climate change, and that is a factor that is not set in stone. So, it's still worth to work in reducing emissions.
  • SiempreViernes 7y ago
    That's a good point, but its going to take gigantic social transformations to be able to sequester all the remaining oil, there is about 800 Gtonn CO_2 in the ground and about 200 or 400 Gton CO_2 of total cumulative emissions if you aim for 1.5 or 2 degrees C.
• neuronic 7y ago
  The only solution would be to drastically reduce the value of oil and therefore make it uneconomic to dig it up. The easy-access oil is decreasing and extraction becomes more expensive.
  • dstroot 7y ago
    This
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • jp555 7y ago
    Kinda like how whale oil was displaced by dug up hydrocarbons.
    • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Whaling was still happily going until there was an international ban in the seventies or eighties. Despite hydrocarbons whale oil and other products were still used in a surprising range of things. Even now after the "ban" that catch is pushing up near 10,000 a year.
      • fr0sty 7y ago
        > Even now after the "ban" that catch is pushing up near 10,000 a year. Not sure this is true. This site[0] puts the total 2018 catch at only 1553. [0]https://iwc.int/total-catches https://iwc.int/total-catches
        • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
          That's doesn't include the main catch nations who didn't sign up to the IWC, or later left it, just what's reported to the IWC by member nations. Norway never joined, and Iceland left IWC for instance. Canada and Denmark (Faroes) can exceed that amount just between the two of them. Some nations have long and significant history of fraudulent reporting -- most excessively the Russians.
  • mr__y 7y ago
    There is an "easy" solution to this problem - introduce a new (preferably renewable) energy source that is an order of magnitude cheaper than oil.
    • rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
      It already exists in the form of Solar/Wind + batteries + EV. Also, as price decrease for this combo, tax fossil fuels for all the damages caused to the environment (taxes to be used to help people switch to renewable energy, and for this transition only otherwise they won't support that tax).
      • cartoonworld 7y ago
        There another angle to this--USA provides vast sums of other monetary aid to oil production. Since it has been a (or perhaps the) strategic commodity, nationally, since WWI our foreign policy is in part directed at those supplies. We expend much military might in the effort to acquire and maintain the alliances and security of the transportation and production of the stuff. A lot of the geopolitical game in the middle east is about the oil. Not "We're gonna take over your country and take it it!" exactly, but the Suez Canal, the Straits of Hormuz, international shipping lanes, and current geopolitical need for a gas pipeline to supply natural gas to Europe drives a lot of jockeying, international conflict, and of course, US strategic military bases, of which there are many. Also I read in the news that some government official put boots are on the ground to protect a Saudi oil field (?...!) So my response to your comment is: "Yes!" however, there will be a long political battle with an absurdly well funded opposition for it.
        • shantly 7y ago
          Hm. That actually raises a good point—how long until militaries can operate without gasoline and diesel? Or even significantly reduce their use? Hard to imagine anything competing with petroleum there in the mid-term future, which mean subsidized production will continue to be necessary to any state that wants to be able to self-sufficiently field an army worth having at all. I mean I guess there's ethanol from plants. Maybe all that corn subsidy stuff actually makes sense in a long-term strategic sense, then. Though you can ramp that up inside a year if you need to and probably much faster by rationing food & feed use of existing corn to repurpose most of it for fuel, so that's probably not what they had in mind and it is just a form of corruption. Crazy, though, if arable land becomes directly correlated to ability to support armored divisions.
  • undersuit 7y ago
    I think from just the very chemistry of oil we can't reduce it's value enough to stop using it. The chemical processes that created it have sequestered massive amounts of energy from the past, energy that we can still use in the future, energy that we don't need take out of our future budgets. Even a space-faring species would take advantage of oil if they deign to enter a planet's gravity well.
• NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Depends. If the developed nations with armies are convinced enough it needs to stay in the ground, they might resort to drone diplomacy. I could foresee an oversight agency similar to that for anti-nuclear proliferation coming into being - to ensure your hydrocarbons are used for non-combustive purposes. On progress of the developed world thus far, you are probably right.
• SiempreViernes 7y ago
  That's a nice way of saying "give up on fighting climate change".
  • bryanlarsen 7y ago
    We can burn as many barrels of oil as we want as long as we pay $100 - $300 per barrel to sequester the resulting CO2. There are places where that makes sense economically, but there aren't very many of those. Of course there are countries that will try to avoid doing that, but they can be coerced to join via carbon tariffs.
    • adrianN 7y ago
      We currently don't have technology that can sequester carbon at the scale required.
      • bryanlarsen 7y ago
        There are dozens of different mechanisms being proposed for carbon sequestration. If there was a viable market for it, at least one of them would become viable very quickly, in my opinion.
• thedevindevops 7y ago
  Well, it need not be burned, it can be converted to a series of products that don't involve burning it, plastics of many types, rubber, I'm sure even pharmaceuticals.
  • gdubs 7y ago
    The problem is you can’t make any of those products without refining oil — and that is one of the biggest sources of emissions on the planet.
  • tomatotomato37 7y ago
    Oil products only take up ~10% of current production, and it will be even less once energy demand decreases and drives prices back up. That's low enough for a single country to monopolize & sustain the world's demand on its own oil production.
• tomp 7y ago
  That would be a catastrophe. Basically all oxygen in the atmosphere is a result of photosynthesis, which (combined with animals breathing) is a closed cycle (edit: in terms of mass, not energy) unless some of the resulting biomass (glucose) is buried underground (as oil and/or coal). Digging up and burning all fossil fuels would consume all oxygen in the atmosphere... let's hope that at least some of it is buried so deep and/or so inaccessible that we don't manage to dig and burn it up!
  • thehappypm 7y ago
    You are spreading fake news. There is far more oxygen in the atmosphere than can be burned by fossil fuels. https://www.popsci.com/amy-geppert/article/2008-09/will-we-run-out-breathable-oxygen-if-we-produce-too-much-carbon-dioxide/ https://www.popsci.com/amy-geppert/article/2008-09/will-we-r...
  • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > Digging up and burning all fossil fuels would consume all oxygen in the atmosphere No, it wouldn’t. Not all biomass turns into fossil fuels. And a lot of carbon is stored in living and recently-deceased biomass.
    • Turing_Machine 7y ago
      Even more of the Earth's original carbon is stored in the miles-deep layers of carbonate rocks that cover much of the Earth's surface.
  • samatman 7y ago
    Photosynthesis is an open cycle, powered by the nuclear fusion reactor at the heart of the Solar System.
  • adrianN 7y ago
    The carbon cycle includes geological processes, so your premise of a closed loop that only involves living things is wrong.
• RockIslandLine 7y ago
  "a poor country that now has a way to print money" Nonsense, of course.
• simonh 7y ago
  Falling oil prices were inevitable anyway. As renewable become more competitive and the shift towards electric vehicles continues demand for oil will fall back. Increased supply, or reduced demand, the effect on prices is the same. Of course the problem is that as prices fall, the range of economically viable uses increase, but I doubt this will be too much of an issue. Petrochemicals are already incredibly cheap compared to many other bulk materials, that's how come supermarkets can afford to give away plastic bags, and so many goods come in plastic packaging. There's only so much further that 'even cheaper' can take us. There are some major decisions we need to make in terms of energy policy. The drive towards renewable is underway, that's good but not enough. I'm beginning to think the environmentalists that have gone pro-nuclear have it right. I read an article a while ago where an environmentalist said Fukushima persuaded him to go pro-nuke. One of the worst designed plants took a direct hit from a once a century Tsunami, the response was bungled, but still there was hardly any leak and no direct radiation casualties. The latest tech is several orders of magnitude safer, and it may well be this or kill the planet. If we go heavy into Nuke and electrify everything, nobody will want the oil for much anyway.
  • Merrill 7y ago
    A plastic bag is about 5.5 grams. 10 bags of groceries would be 55 grams. A gallon (US) of gas is about 3350 grams. So if you drive 5 miles round trip in a car getting 20 miles/gallon for local driving, it uses 837 grams of gas. The oil in the bags is about 6% of the oil used on such a shopping trip. Of course that doesn't include the plastic packaging of food, soft drinks, bottled water, etc. which is probably more comparable to the amount of oil used by the car.
    • WhompingWindows 7y ago
      You're throwing out a lot of numbers, do you have sources for those calculations? Specifically on the bags and how much oil is needed to produce plastics.
    • cartoonworld 7y ago
      Your point is well taken but please keep in mind that the inputs for fuel oil and plastic aren't the same. For example, plastic production requires ethylene which is a different product of the fuel cracking process. Notice the PE or HDPE in recycling brands, the E is Ethylene. Drawing a 1:1 relationship between gasoline and plastic inputs is not accurate.
• endorphone 7y ago
  Oil doesn't extract and process itself, and there are many reserves of oil that will never make sense to pump. Already in a lot of areas, such as the oil sands, it's tenuous because oil is barely at a price to support extraction, yet oil is expensive enough that it's being undercut by clean energy. Enormous reserves will never be extracted through simple, basic economics. We're already at a breaking point.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • anovikov 7y ago
    But the whole story are the new extraction methods which make reserves inaccessible or uneconomical to extract before, accessible and economical. Yeah people need to get real: any and all hydrocarbons will be dug out at some point. Unless you want to make a pact to nuke the countries that do it beyond a certain level (which can double as a nice way to mitigate global warming at least for a while). For some nations such as Saudi Arabia, digging and selling hydrocarbons is the core and essence of their existence and is what separating them from bedouins/forest people living in the wild in total savagery. There is absolutely no way they could do something else for a living. Developed nations could stop doing it. Europe for example, almost did (it has even more shale oil and gas than U.S. does and made a conscious decision to ban it's extraction), U.S. could do too if it wanted, but many poor countries just can't.
    • heylook 7y ago
      That's like saying that we all need to accept that any and all whales will be harvested for whale oil to keep our lamps burning
  • fuzzfactor 7y ago
    >Oil doesn't extract and process itself, and there are many reserves of oil that will never make sense to pump. True, but the most desirable wells to oilmen once drilled do actually produce oil at such a high rate naturally without further energy input that they need to have their flow rate restricted in order to become manageable. Processing, maintenance and further drilling can then be accomplished from revenue itself without further capital investment. Relative to other things on Wall Street, it might as well extract and process itself.
• refurb 7y ago
  Disagree. Just look at what happen the last time the cost of oil plunged - exploration slows to a crawl and some wells are just shut down as they can’t make money off the oil. It makes no sense to spend $10 to create a barrel of crude oil you can sell for $9.
  • wallace_f 7y ago
    Also what doesn't make sense is the world's plutocrats and even the top 1% being irrational enough to let the world economy, modern Western society, that they sit atop of collapse. I mean it could be the case, but what's more likely, and at least worth considering, is that its not. Though questioning authority and what you are taught to think appears difficult for every generation of people.
  • peteey 7y ago
    Your contradiction is only temporary. The countries which product oil at today's price will eventually exhaust their oilfields. In response, oil prices will rise and other countries will be motivated to drill their own reserves. We will consume all convenient oil sooner or later.
    • spikels 7y ago
      The weasel word is “convenient” which mean expensive to produce.
• perfunctory 7y ago
  > it's naive to think that humans will leave any oil in the ground despite climate change I think it's worth pointing out that you and I are also humans. Whether they, humans, leave any oil in the ground or not partially depends on us. If we are worried about climate change, we humans can actually do something about it.
  • spurgu 7y ago
    Are you and I in control of huge corporations?
    • spurgu 7y ago
      In some countries you and I have the power to elect politicians who can decide on these things, but in most cases the corporations have more power than the politicians, at least in practice.
    • ars 7y ago
      Yes. Corporation do what their customers want. So you, as a customer, have control of them.
      • anticensor 7y ago
        Only indirectly.
      • cultofmetatron 7y ago
        looks at missing esc key on my 2019 mbp yea sure, "I'm in control"
        • sullyj3 7y ago
          well, you bought it.
          • cultofmetatron 7y ago
            you have an alternative way to build ios apps?
• milesward 7y ago
  Nope, not if solar/batteries get cheaper: it won't be worth digging up
  • acidburnNSA 7y ago
    As the generators have gotten cheaper, there's some indication that total energy costs have increased because of the cost of dealing with the intermittent nature of wind and solar. So for economics one must look well beyond levelized cost of electricity nowadays. If indeed energy storage costs dominate beyond 40% renewable penetration (total energy) then the exponential curve we see today at the 5% level will likely level off. In 2018 carbon emissions increased by 2% worldwide even though renewables grew by 15%.
    • adrianN 7y ago
      We are very far away from 40% renewables for primary energy consumption. Almost all countries are very far away even if you just look at electricity.
      • acidburnNSA 7y ago
        Exactly. We're closer to the 5% level today. I just see a lot of people seeing good renewable performance at a subsystems level and thinking it will continue unfettered up to the point that matters for climate change mitigation. Meanwhile we're actually building massive amounts of fracked natural gas generators, we're shutting down low-carbon nuclear plants, oil use in Asia is going gangbusters, NIMBYism around wind and solar and transmission is ramping up, and carbon emissions are rising at 2%/year. I feel like the "solar is now dirt cheap, and batteries!" thing is acting as a lullaby when we really need to continue to be alarmed about climate change and work hard to mitigate it. This problem isn't going to solve itself.
        • greglindahl 7y ago
          No one is saying we should stop being alarmed. Sheesh.
• matthewdgreen 7y ago
  Not much interest in whale oil as a fuel anymore. When people find a replacement, they switch to it. The hope (prayer) is that renewable prices will fall to a tiny fraction of oil exploration/extraction/distribution costs that the idea of using it as a mass fuel is quaint. It's likely to happen, too -- just not clear if it'll happen fast enough.
  • Robotbeat 7y ago
    That's because its use is banned. Until 1972, sperm oil was a very common additive in auto transmissions without an equivalent replacement. After the ban of its use, reliability of transmissions dropped by an order of magnitude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications It took banning whaling and putting the sperm whale on the endangered species list and banning the sale of sperm oil to stop its usage. I have a feeling fossil fuels will be the same. Even if many countries no longer use coal for primary electricity production, fossil fuel use will continue at far-too-high rates until there's effectively a global ban on net CO2 emissions.
    • matthewdgreen 7y ago
      The success of the 1972 ban reflects that fact that by 1972 whale oil had transformed from an irreplaceable source of energy and lighting (as it was in the mid-19th century) into a niche additive with a few specialized applications -- many of which already possessed better alternatives that just needed to be scaled and brought to market. Basically, people were using it just because it was convenient, not because it was irreplaceable. We're not there with fossil fuels, unfortunately. Before Congress can ban them, we need technological alternatives in place that make the transition about as painful as the whale oil ban was.
      • Robotbeat 7y ago
        This is true for gasoline vehicles right now. We can replace every gas powered road vehicle now with one that has a plug in it. A transitional period would be to allow a backup engine (like in the Chevy Volt) while we get charging availability to just as high as it is for gasoline.
• alex-wallish 7y ago
  I disagree. If we get to a point where alternative energy sources are scalable and cheaper to produce than oil, then there will be a very limited market for the oil and no profit to be made.