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Taxpayers may have to pay $280B in plugging costs for oil and gas wells
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIf only we had patched creditor law to make these costs first in the charging order when an O&G company is distressed, or instituted responsible reserve/escrow amounts (1%!?) for remediation. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. Oh well, will make quite the book of work for a civil conservation corps.
- austinheap 6y ago> Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. It’s the American way, at this point; another gift from the generation before us.
- sixQuarks 6y agomeanwhile, morons keep claiming Tesla lives off government subsidies.
- mhh__ 6y agoThey can both be true, no? Tesla's P/E is roughly 1100, they aren't exactly printing money.
- Retric 6y agoThat really doesn’t say much. Amazon’s P/E looked insane for years, while still being a good investment. The real question is what do future profits look like, and past performance is often a poor indicator of future performance.
- mhh__ 6y agoPerhaps, but for Tesla to go to being what Amazon is now would take so much luck/decision-making I just can't see it happening. They make nice cars, but they would have to dominate the market in a way they can't even dream of today. For example, Tesla sold 300k cars last year - ford alone sold something like 6 million. Tesla have to compete with the entire world's car industry including companies that have much more experience selling cars at that scale. Is it impossible, no, is it unlikely yes - Tesla will grow from now but I just can't see that P/E turning into cold hard cash. Also, Amazon's P/E peaked at 3.6k but only for 2012. It's been around a tenth of Tesla's current P/E for almost all of their time on the exchange. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/pe-ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/pe-rat...
- Retric 6y agoI haven’t dug deeply into their financials, but directly comparing them to other car companies is misleading as they are far more vertically integrated. An EV charging network, direct sales, and building significantly more parts in house means they can extract more money even if they sold an identical product to the rest of the market. I doubt the solar business or grid batteries are particularly profitable, but it’s the same Apple vs Samsung song and dance. Outsourcing everything means you’re sharing profits with your suppliers and have little leverage over your competitors. That’s not to say they can or will do all of that profitability. Tesla’s self driving tech could fall behind rendering a massive investment worthless. But, the numbers aren’t so high it’s impossible for them to be a great investment just IMO unlikely.
- mrnobody_67 6y agoNegative externalities born by the public, but profits go to shareholders.
- mhh__ 6y agoExactly, I really hope a coalition can form (around the world) between all opposed to this kind of policy (be they capitalists, anti-capitalists etc.). These corrupt distortions will kill the planet and harm the west.
- smhost 6y agoThe problem is that when you create an international coalition powerful enough to control capital and to go against its logic, you've built a communism. Under that system, the common ideological space (what yuval noah harai calls "the greatest story ever told") comes under an active, deliberate intervention by a political will, and there's just no way the people in power are ever going to share in the kind of control they enjoy now.
- mhh__ 6y agoWhy? If I organise enough people to vote to end subsidies like those featured in the article, I have created communism? What is practised in the west isn't even along a socialism-capitalism axis, it's just corruption. That is a problem in any society held together by words.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoWhy is corruption a problem specifically in a society held together by words? In what kind of society wouldn't it be a problem?
- mhh__ 6y agoThe remark was mostly to point out that we can and should aim for better, but we don't. I'm a bit drunk so excuse any poor oracy
- anm89 6y agoI don't get this one. There is enough money at stake here for the lawmakers to go after the companies and they have a huge economic/political incentive not to dump tax increases on their constituents. So basically, how is this not a huge federal suit? If there is one thing I do expect its for this stuff to work itself out when the politicians have a clear interest in doing so? On the other hand maybe I'm missing something ?
- andrei_says_ 6y agoThere are almost no politicians in office who have not been vetted, negotiated with, and financed by the very companies that are getting away with this.
- lostcolony 6y agoLobbyists + political donations means the politicians have lots of incentive NOT to do anything about it. The environment may matter to Democrats, but as a party they could also drop it without losing many if any votes; after all, it's not like Democratic voters who care about that issue can go to the GOP, and they likely also won't stay home since there are other issues they care about. Let's be clear here; when only one of the two parties in power even accepts that something is even a problem, the other can do whatever is most expedient about it without consequence.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoTheir "constituents"? Who do you think they are? Are we not talking about America? The constituents are the companies, not the voters. Seriously it is frustrating watching the US from outside. Watching how American just let themselves getting screwed over again and again and again. Only to ask for more. The paranoia about government and the praise of capitalism is so strong in America that people will rather embrace crony capitalism with a warm hug than do anything that means you risk getting called anti-business, job-destroyer, socialist, communist or whatever. There is not democracy in America anymore. It is the same "system" as Iran. Sure you get to vote, to retain the illusion of choice. The mullah's deciding on who gets to run has been replaced by the 1 percent, the donor class. You are allowed to vote on whomever they approve of.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoAfter 2006 operators in Texas generally pay these costs up front when getting permits to drill the wells. There is also aftermarket for taking over abandoned wells (though I'm not super familiar with the economics.)
- kthejoker2 6y agoIt's very straightforward: you buy the land, you get the mineral rights. So cost of acquisition is: how much land, the working condition of the well equipment, and nearby production as a proxy for reserve capacities (or, in lieu of that, a finger in the wind.) One popular site for selling/re-selling both unleased and leased acreage is https://themineralmarket.com/ https://themineralmarket.com/
- FpUser 6y agoThat's our lobby / legalized bribery system working hard.
- supernova87a 6y agoHuh, what happened to personal responsibility?
- socialdemocrat 6y agoIn America that only applies to poor people, and especially black people. To the rich, it does not apply. Rather you are responsible for THEIR problems.
- nine_zeros 6y agoHahaha, you really bought this? It's only personal responsibility when it applies to individual, poor or minority issues. A big oil company causing societal level damage and seeking bailouts? Printer goes brrrr. Oh the amount of self hate people must have to keep voting for this crap over and over again.
- supernova87a 6y agoBtw, I was being sarcastic...
- phkahler 6y agoThis is ON-shore wells. Just imagine the cost of closing offshore ones.
- vaccinator 6y agoThis reminds me of the BP oil spill that leaked for months... they had to pay a reasonable fine, but they purchased so many gas stations in the region afterwards... I think to prevent people from boycotting them.
- radium3d 6y agoXOM, EOG, COP and APC can pick up the tab I'm sure.
- alex_young 6y agoSadly this is how mining works. The gold mining companies literally raped the ground in Montana for decades, with the same pattern of using highly toxic cyanide leach fields to extract low volumes of gold from massive quantities of ore, take profits, pay huge bonuses to the board, and then declare bankruptcy and form a new company to repeat the process, leaving the state to pay for cleanup. Montana passed laws to force them to buy insurance upfront for cleanup and tried to ban executives from doing this over and over again. It largely worked, but they just moved to other places that don’t understand or don’t care yet. https://billingsgazette.com/opinion/columnists/guest-opinion-deqs-duty-to-enforce-montana-mining-law/article_eb75ebf3-1a5d-5534-926d-fbb98a1adf9c.html https://billingsgazette.com/opinion/columnists/guest-opinion...
- srtjstjsj 6y agoThese people should be in prison, plain and simple. If I pour poison int the gutter, I wouldn't be acquitted just because the specific way I poured a specific poison wasn't written into the law.
- mtnGoat 6y agoIf you are rich enough and have the correct corporate structure, you can poison anything you want in America. I think WV had shown this.
- GuB-42 6y agoIn prison... or dead. In China, you can be sentenced to death for "serious pollution case". And if that isn't serious pollution, I don't know what is. https://nypost.com/2013/06/21/serious-polluters-in-china-to-be-given-death-penalty-report/ https://nypost.com/2013/06/21/serious-polluters-in-china-to-...