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Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels? It seems that every attempt to limit the consumption of fossil fuels

Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels? It seems that every attempt to limit the consumption of fossil fuels is going to have a limited effect if we don't reduce the supply, since a reduction in consumption will lead to an oversupply, which will in turn make burning fossil fuels for other purposes cheaper. If the leading producers committed to a 10% reduction each year, then we would have some (big!) problems to solve, but we would at least be making progress. I know that the economies of the leading producers is deeply tied to the production of fossil fuels, but at the current rate of global warming, no investment in fossil fuel production is going to be a viable long-term strategy anyway: if the sector continues to grow, then your money from the profits will be worthless for other obvious reasons anyway.

perfunctory 7y ago
> Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels? This is basically the same as asking why don't we do more to stop climate change. And the answer is the same. Because we the people don't demand it from our governments. Not hard enough anyway.
- ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
  I think the demand for action is present and will only increase in the years to come, so I am not worried about that anymore, actually. My question was more why this particular course of action is not taken? What are the main arguments against it, and can we do something to address those?
taurath 7y ago
Because the extractors of fossil fuels drives significant portions of the economy and we’d have to change how we measure things. Plus the amount of money they throw around. Much of the time they’re the only industry in poor or underdeveloped regions, and we have no real way to deal with the economic impact.
- ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
  Good, this means we have now identified the real problem that we need to solve. In any case, if we really believed that we could succeed in just limiting our emissions without enforcing a scarcity of fossil fuels, that would lead to a drastic reduction in demand anyway, which would have the same economic impact on said poor and underdeveloped regions. These regions are also going to be the ones most affected by climate change, so they will lose big time either way. I am not saying that this is fair, but no approach is really going to be fair to everyone. At least by ripping the band-aid off, we will (1) make actual, concrete progress, and (2) make it explicit who is going to suffer (the poor and underdeveloped regions that depend on fossil fuel production) and that we as a world are responsible for ensuring the affected people a livelihood. Humans are much better at dealing with problems related to scarcity, as this causes us to really think about how to make things more efficient. If good advice about how to reduce your personal consumption for your own good really worked, then we would have a western world populated by fit and healthy Greek gods, but we don't: we have an obesity epidemic because it is not in the human nature to limit your consumption even if you have all the information about how to do it available to you. Now, the real big problem is how to enforce this yearly reduction in fossil fuel production. I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to.
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    > I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to. Would you clarify who should threaten who in your scenario? Just FYI, US is now the biggest oil producer in the world.
    - ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
      I am aware that this is not a realistic course of action. The problem is that scaling down fossil fuel production is going to be a very bad economic decision for any country in the short term, and it seems to be difficult, politically, to take that local economic hit for the long term interests of humanity at a global scale. At least the immediate threat of nuclear repercussions would convert the alternative into a short term local risk, which is politically more palatable. Of course, any nuclear nation threatening other nations like that would become a pariah, so it isn't likely to happen. Also because, as you say, it is against their own short-term economic interests. Edit: It would be pretty ironic if North Korea, which is already a pariah, turned out to save the planet by taking on that role.
mortdeus 7y ago
10 years ago when I still lived in CA (where i grew up), I was the liberal rebel in my family of CA Republicans, I argued with my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) about the issue of Global Warming but rather than trying to take him on head on about the ethical nature of supporting it, I tried to take the approach of talking about Electric Cars and how Elon Musk was paving the way towards a future where nobody would need to use fossil fuels anymore. (this was back when Tesla was still pretty much a pitch) He asked me how much would a new Tesla cost? I said well right now they are $120k, but eventually Elon Musk plans to get that price all the way down to $40k. My grandfather said, he can go right now and buy a 4 cylinder truck for $2000 dollars that gets 25 miles to the gallon and with gas at $3 a gallon he could literally get 360,000 miles out of a vehicle, and then guess what buy another truck for $2000 dollars for the same amount of money it took to buy a 40k electric car... His argument was very simple, and having moved to Oklahoma after the economy crashed in 2007, I understand now more than ever why his conservative pov was correct. The reality is that you can't make the world conform to your utopia when it first conforms to its budget. You think this issue can be solved with simply a 10% reduction each year, when you need to realize people don't buy gas because they are going on family trips all the time they can choose to do the right thing and cut back on. People are buying gas to go to work and back everyday. Literally the only way we could cut back on our current fossil fuel usage is if Andrew Yang's worst nightmare came to fruition and the robots did take all the jobs, that way we didn't have to commute to work everyday.
- ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
  You need to think about why people need gas to go to work and back every day. They do this because their work is located far away from their home. And why is that? Because it was economically viable to set it up like that, because of the low price of gas. Increase the price of gas, and you will get an economic recession in the short term, for sure. But after that, people will adjust, and you will see a reversal of the current trend of centralizing all jobs in the big cities. Towns would get more local businesses, people doing business would invest more in high-quality video conferencing instead of traveling to meetings by plane all the time, and so on. Some things that are possible today would not be possible anymore, and we would have to deal with that. I think it is a fallacy to see the current way society works as a constant. Everything is holistically connected, and if you change one variable (price of fossil fuels), then the rest of society will have to shape itself around that.
dvdkhlng 7y ago
Same idea stated differently: the problem is the amount of carbon available at the planet's surface: a huge portion of that carbon will eventually end up as CO2, as that is the lowest energy state. Earth's biosphere allows for an equilibrium where part of that carbon will will be present as non-CO2 (i.e. biomass), but as we get more carbon to the surface, we'd have to move the equilibrium point to compensate for the added carbon, which doesn't seem to be a scalable solution. The only scalable solution is to stop bringing up more carbon to the surface :)
socialdemocrat 7y ago
Absolute AGREE!!! Why are so few others pointing this out!! If oil was heroin, our current approach is like telling heroin dealers to keep pushing their drugs, but put all the onus on the junkies to stop buying so much of the heroin. It is TOTALLY backwards! I am saying this as someone who benefits immensely from living in an oil producing country (Norway). We are f...ing expanding our oil production while building windmills to make our oil production "cleaner." Everybody in Norway seems to be patting themselves on the back that we are reaching our climate goals by reducing emissions from oil production. Never mind that those emissions are like 1% of the emissions from actually burning the oil. But that problem we leave to the buys. It is infuriating. My proposal to win over fellow Norwegians is that we join an oil Cartel like OPEC. We then lobby OPEC to become a cartel for green change. All oil producers agree to begin gradual reductions in output. This will cause the price to go up, so Norway and other will not get the big economic hit that is making it politically unpopular to reduce oil production. It also means all oil producers share they burden. Oil consumers will then have to start reducing their consumption because oil will get more expensive. This ought to be a win-win situation.
multiplegeorges 7y ago
This is what a price on carbon and carbon taxes are intended to address. As the price of use or production of carbon rises, it will spur investment and competition in alternative forms of energy. Further, a tax credit for removing carbon from the atmosphere will help spur removal technologies and we can begin to make a dent in everything that's already in the atmosphere.
- ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
  We also need taxing of emissions to curb emissions of other greenhouse gases (mostly methane) that are not tied directly to the burning of fossil fuels. For example emissions from household animals, drained farmland and so on. The problem with these kinds of taxation systems is that they are really difficult to enforce, because you need a way to measure the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by each individual business. Taxation of emissions is another tool in the toolbox, but we also need to guarantee that the consumption of fossil fuels is decreasing at the same time. Taxation may help, but it provides no guarantee of that.
  - pms 7y ago
    Once oil producers have to pay the carbon tax, the consumption will go down, because the price of oil will go up.

perfunctory 7y ago

> Why aren't we doing more to address the source of the problem: extraction of fossil fuels? This is basically the same as asking why don't we do more to stop climate change. And the answer is the same. Because we the people don't demand it from our governments. Not hard enough anyway.

ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
I think the demand for action is present and will only increase in the years to come, so I am not worried about that anymore, actually. My question was more why this particular course of action is not taken? What are the main arguments against it, and can we do something to address those?

taurath 7y ago

Because the extractors of fossil fuels drives significant portions of the economy and we’d have to change how we measure things. Plus the amount of money they throw around. Much of the time they’re the only industry in poor or underdeveloped regions, and we have no real way to deal with the economic impact.

ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
Good, this means we have now identified the real problem that we need to solve. In any case, if we really believed that we could succeed in just limiting our emissions without enforcing a scarcity of fossil fuels, that would lead to a drastic reduction in demand anyway, which would have the same economic impact on said poor and underdeveloped regions. These regions are also going to be the ones most affected by climate change, so they will lose big time either way. I am not saying that this is fair, but no approach is really going to be fair to everyone. At least by ripping the band-aid off, we will (1) make actual, concrete progress, and (2) make it explicit who is going to suffer (the poor and underdeveloped regions that depend on fossil fuel production) and that we as a world are responsible for ensuring the affected people a livelihood. Humans are much better at dealing with problems related to scarcity, as this causes us to really think about how to make things more efficient. If good advice about how to reduce your personal consumption for your own good really worked, then we would have a western world populated by fit and healthy Greek gods, but we don't: we have an obesity epidemic because it is not in the human nature to limit your consumption even if you have all the information about how to do it available to you. Now, the real big problem is how to enforce this yearly reduction in fossil fuel production. I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to.
- perfunctory 7y ago
  > I don't know, but I can think of one way involving the immediate threat of instant sunshine followed by nuclear winter. At least this is a kind of threat that humans can better relate to. Would you clarify who should threaten who in your scenario? Just FYI, US is now the biggest oil producer in the world.
  - ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
    I am aware that this is not a realistic course of action. The problem is that scaling down fossil fuel production is going to be a very bad economic decision for any country in the short term, and it seems to be difficult, politically, to take that local economic hit for the long term interests of humanity at a global scale. At least the immediate threat of nuclear repercussions would convert the alternative into a short term local risk, which is politically more palatable. Of course, any nuclear nation threatening other nations like that would become a pariah, so it isn't likely to happen. Also because, as you say, it is against their own short-term economic interests. Edit: It would be pretty ironic if North Korea, which is already a pariah, turned out to save the planet by taking on that role.

mortdeus 7y ago

10 years ago when I still lived in CA (where i grew up), I was the liberal rebel in my family of CA Republicans, I argued with my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) about the issue of Global Warming but rather than trying to take him on head on about the ethical nature of supporting it, I tried to take the approach of talking about Electric Cars and how Elon Musk was paving the way towards a future where nobody would need to use fossil fuels anymore. (this was back when Tesla was still pretty much a pitch) He asked me how much would a new Tesla cost? I said well right now they are $120k, but eventually Elon Musk plans to get that price all the way down to $40k. My grandfather said, he can go right now and buy a 4 cylinder truck for $2000 dollars that gets 25 miles to the gallon and with gas at $3 a gallon he could literally get 360,000 miles out of a vehicle, and then guess what buy another truck for $2000 dollars for the same amount of money it took to buy a 40k electric car... His argument was very simple, and having moved to Oklahoma after the economy crashed in 2007, I understand now more than ever why his conservative pov was correct. The reality is that you can't make the world conform to your utopia when it first conforms to its budget. You think this issue can be solved with simply a 10% reduction each year, when you need to realize people don't buy gas because they are going on family trips all the time they can choose to do the right thing and cut back on. People are buying gas to go to work and back everyday. Literally the only way we could cut back on our current fossil fuel usage is if Andrew Yang's worst nightmare came to fruition and the robots did take all the jobs, that way we didn't have to commute to work everyday.

ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
You need to think about why people need gas to go to work and back every day. They do this because their work is located far away from their home. And why is that? Because it was economically viable to set it up like that, because of the low price of gas. Increase the price of gas, and you will get an economic recession in the short term, for sure. But after that, people will adjust, and you will see a reversal of the current trend of centralizing all jobs in the big cities. Towns would get more local businesses, people doing business would invest more in high-quality video conferencing instead of traveling to meetings by plane all the time, and so on. Some things that are possible today would not be possible anymore, and we would have to deal with that. I think it is a fallacy to see the current way society works as a constant. Everything is holistically connected, and if you change one variable (price of fossil fuels), then the rest of society will have to shape itself around that.

dvdkhlng 7y ago

Same idea stated differently: the problem is the amount of carbon available at the planet's surface: a huge portion of that carbon will eventually end up as CO2, as that is the lowest energy state. Earth's biosphere allows for an equilibrium where part of that carbon will will be present as non-CO2 (i.e. biomass), but as we get more carbon to the surface, we'd have to move the equilibrium point to compensate for the added carbon, which doesn't seem to be a scalable solution. The only scalable solution is to stop bringing up more carbon to the surface :)

socialdemocrat 7y ago

Absolute AGREE!!! Why are so few others pointing this out!! If oil was heroin, our current approach is like telling heroin dealers to keep pushing their drugs, but put all the onus on the junkies to stop buying so much of the heroin. It is TOTALLY backwards! I am saying this as someone who benefits immensely from living in an oil producing country (Norway). We are f...ing expanding our oil production while building windmills to make our oil production "cleaner." Everybody in Norway seems to be patting themselves on the back that we are reaching our climate goals by reducing emissions from oil production. Never mind that those emissions are like 1% of the emissions from actually burning the oil. But that problem we leave to the buys. It is infuriating. My proposal to win over fellow Norwegians is that we join an oil Cartel like OPEC. We then lobby OPEC to become a cartel for green change. All oil producers agree to begin gradual reductions in output. This will cause the price to go up, so Norway and other will not get the big economic hit that is making it politically unpopular to reduce oil production. It also means all oil producers share they burden. Oil consumers will then have to start reducing their consumption because oil will get more expensive. This ought to be a win-win situation.

multiplegeorges 7y ago

This is what a price on carbon and carbon taxes are intended to address. As the price of use or production of carbon rises, it will spur investment and competition in alternative forms of energy. Further, a tax credit for removing carbon from the atmosphere will help spur removal technologies and we can begin to make a dent in everything that's already in the atmosphere.

ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
We also need taxing of emissions to curb emissions of other greenhouse gases (mostly methane) that are not tied directly to the burning of fossil fuels. For example emissions from household animals, drained farmland and so on. The problem with these kinds of taxation systems is that they are really difficult to enforce, because you need a way to measure the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by each individual business. Taxation of emissions is another tool in the toolbox, but we also need to guarantee that the consumption of fossil fuels is decreasing at the same time. Taxation may help, but it provides no guarantee of that.
- pms 7y ago
  Once oil producers have to pay the carbon tax, the consumption will go down, because the price of oil will go up.