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“No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas becaus

by rcarr 4y ago

“No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work.“ This is the real problem and also the lie. The people to whom the prices are “unacceptably high” are the people at the top of the pyramid who would subsequently need to pay appropriate wages. I would hazard a guess that if you took the current wages of workers which have essentially stagnated and regressed for fifty years and raised them to where they would have been had they been increasing at their pre 1970s rate, and then compared that purchasing power to where prices are at now, all of a sudden the prices of things would not seem so out of whack. Executive suite are still getting ridiculous pay rises, investors are still getting ridiculous returns, meanwhile the same companies are continuing to try to shaft workers with below inflation pay rises. You cannot skim in this fashion indefinitely, eventually you get to the point we’re at now where the jig is up, you’ve put so much wealth at the top that it collapses the pillars holding the whole system up. You cannot just park billions of money in ‘safe’ assets (e.g housing) like Smaug the dragon because you’re afraid of losing money. The money represents resources. If you’re not smart enough or brave enough to choose worthwhile and worthy people and enterprises, organisations etc to invest the money in then you don’t deserve to have it and it should be reallocated via the mechanisms of the market to smarter people who do. Yet the government keep bailing out failing company or bank after failing company or bank rather than letting the natural reallocation occur. And so we end up with a zombie economy that preys on the living to feed the dead.

thrown_22 4y ago
You're making the mistake of thinking money means anything. Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make accounting easier. Whenever the thermodynamics doesn't work economics stops working either. The 1970s were a short period were thermodynamics were sub-optimal. The dark ages were a longer period. Money is ink on paper or bits in a computer. Neither of those things runs a tractor or lets water flow.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make accounting easier. Shouldn't it be "Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make trade / exchange easier"?
- soco 4y ago
  You're right, money don't run tractors or flow waters. But they build serious incentives for either - people won't run a tractor if the incentive is missing, or a too strong incentive might stop a water flow.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    People don't run tractors. Fossil fuels do. And we've been told that we're phasing out fossil fuels some time between 2030 and 2050. How do we run tractors then? Probably with horses. Welcome to 1500. Please mind the plague.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Electricity?
- yunohn 4y ago
  > Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make accounting easier. Maybe you could link a source explaining this correlation with some examples? Otherwise, it just sounds like “higher salaries for more effort”, which is obviously false.
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    - yunohn 4y ago
- 4y ago
javisnsi 4y ago
> No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. I am not sure I am convinced with the author's argument. Even if we put aside how all (or most) politicians and public fossil fuel companies (who should disclose existential risks for the company) are conspiring together to lie, I don't understand what is the motivation is for all these parties to work together to lie, just to keep wages low (but if execs are getting ridiculous pays, wages for the company as a line item are perhaps still high). Wouldn't companies see an existential risk and plan ahead to try to diversify investments, rising pricing if its progressively getting expensive over the years to produce etc.. Reminds me of what a friend recently told me - Its funny how the politicians/government/bureaucracies are both incapable of doing anything useful yet also capable of world wide conspiracies.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Conspiracy to sit on you hands looks a lot like incapability to do anything.
- nevrherd 4y ago
  Their plan is project an image of cool headed control to keep their power and status quo intact as long as possible. No reason to be the one to risk destabilizing things that work well for them. Even if society intentionally reorganized itself, institutions may become meaningless, ending the good times for leaders and their cottage industry the institution provides. I don’t think it’s an intentional conspiracy, but lack of material upside (the root of power being material ownership), for powers that be to risk their power and (for some) legacy as being the one in charge when it all went sideways. Such folks do not live long after the fall.
- rcarr 4y ago
  There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy. All it needs is for the majority of people in leadership positions to act in their own self interests rather than in the interest of the people they’re meant to be representing. The outcome is the same as if there was a big conspiracy theory. It’s like having two functions, you put the same variables in, the function bodies are different, but they both spit out the same result.
chrisco255 4y ago
The costs of extraction have nothing to do with it. It's just dysfunctional political systems that toggle back and forth between "let's ban fossil fuels", and "omg, the greedy gas companies are charging $6 a gallon!" The former caused the latter. Very little investment has been made in tapping new wells because of hamstringing by ESG virtue signaling. As a result, we're in a pickle. The inflation we're experiencing has nothing to do with energy supply, it has everything to do with monetary, diplomatic, and fiscal policy.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  I really hate it when people are spewing garbage mixed with fact. Yes, the inflation has nothing to do with energy supply, or even price of digging it all up. The pricing of it is always driven by a plausible excuse and greed. No, investment in tapping new wells is at an all time high, and for example has turned USA into a net oil exporter. Gas too. Thing is, fossil fuels are not evenly distributed, nor do we want to use them to heat up the planet more. So when a major producer is cut off or decides to do everyone in, we get a price spike, and prices rarely return to baseline.
ETH_start 4y ago
>>The people to whom the prices are “unacceptably high” are the people at the top of the pyramid who would subsequently need to pay appropriate wages. I would hazard a guess that if you took the current wages of workers which have essentially stagnated and regressed for fifty years and raised them to where they would have been had they been increasing at their pre 1970s rate, and then compared that purchasing power to where prices are at now, all of a sudden the prices of things would not seem so out of whack. There are several things are wrong with this: Wages have grown at their fastest rate in history, globally, over the last 30 years: https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-war-on-poverty https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/World/2016/0207... It is only in the advanced economies where wage growth has slowed. And the slowdown is much less severe than commonly believed. I personally spent years promulgating this graph all over the internet: https://imgur.com/BlEiA9d https://imgur.com/BlEiA9d I wish someone had pointed out to me in what ways this graph is misleading. This article does a good job of doing that: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-sources-real-wage-stagnation-bosworth http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-source... To summarize: 1. Wages are just one component of employment compensation. When the nonwage components - which have grown faster than wages - are factored in, you see the line track productivity growth much more closely. 2. Another factor creating the illusion of a growing gap between productivity and worker compensation is the use of different inflation indexes to measure productivity and worker compensation. The indexes largely mirrored each other before 1973, but diverged significantly since then, leading to inflation-adjusted worker compensation growth appearing artificially depressed compared to inflation-adjusted productivity growth. 3. Worker compensation growth has in fact slowed somewhat, and almost all of this slowdown can be explained by the commensurate slowdown in productivity growth in the US. >>investors are still getting ridiculous returns Investors are not getting ridiculous returns. If you look at labor's share of national income, it has largely remained the same if you exclude just one asset category: housing, where rent has increased faster than not just inflation, but income as well. See Figure 3: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... And the solution to outsized gains due to housing scarcity is not to ban profiteering. It's to solve the housing scarcity problem. One study estimates that if just three cities - San Francisco, San Jose and New York - had limited the growth of their housing sector regulations to that of the median rate of all US cities, US GDP would have grown by 36 percent more between 1964 and 2009: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

by rcarr 4y ago

thrown_22 4y ago

You're making the mistake of thinking money means anything. Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make accounting easier. Whenever the thermodynamics doesn't work economics stops working either. The 1970s were a short period were thermodynamics were sub-optimal. The dark ages were a longer period. Money is ink on paper or bits in a computer. Neither of those things runs a tractor or lets water flow.

andsoitis 4y ago
> Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make accounting easier. Shouldn't it be "Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make trade / exchange easier"?
soco 4y ago
You're right, money don't run tractors or flow waters. But they build serious incentives for either - people won't run a tractor if the incentive is missing, or a too strong incentive might stop a water flow.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  People don't run tractors. Fossil fuels do. And we've been told that we're phasing out fossil fuels some time between 2030 and 2050. How do we run tractors then? Probably with horses. Welcome to 1500. Please mind the plague.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    Electricity?
yunohn 4y ago
> Economics is a thin veneer we put over thermodynamics to make accounting easier. Maybe you could link a source explaining this correlation with some examples? Otherwise, it just sounds like “higher salaries for more effort”, which is obviously false.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  - yunohn 4y ago
4y ago

javisnsi 4y ago

> No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. I am not sure I am convinced with the author's argument. Even if we put aside how all (or most) politicians and public fossil fuel companies (who should disclose existential risks for the company) are conspiring together to lie, I don't understand what is the motivation is for all these parties to work together to lie, just to keep wages low (but if execs are getting ridiculous pays, wages for the company as a line item are perhaps still high). Wouldn't companies see an existential risk and plan ahead to try to diversify investments, rising pricing if its progressively getting expensive over the years to produce etc.. Reminds me of what a friend recently told me - Its funny how the politicians/government/bureaucracies are both incapable of doing anything useful yet also capable of world wide conspiracies.

peteradio 4y ago
Conspiracy to sit on you hands looks a lot like incapability to do anything.
nevrherd 4y ago
Their plan is project an image of cool headed control to keep their power and status quo intact as long as possible. No reason to be the one to risk destabilizing things that work well for them. Even if society intentionally reorganized itself, institutions may become meaningless, ending the good times for leaders and their cottage industry the institution provides. I don’t think it’s an intentional conspiracy, but lack of material upside (the root of power being material ownership), for powers that be to risk their power and (for some) legacy as being the one in charge when it all went sideways. Such folks do not live long after the fall.
rcarr 4y ago
There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy. All it needs is for the majority of people in leadership positions to act in their own self interests rather than in the interest of the people they’re meant to be representing. The outcome is the same as if there was a big conspiracy theory. It’s like having two functions, you put the same variables in, the function bodies are different, but they both spit out the same result.

chrisco255 4y ago

The costs of extraction have nothing to do with it. It's just dysfunctional political systems that toggle back and forth between "let's ban fossil fuels", and "omg, the greedy gas companies are charging $6 a gallon!" The former caused the latter. Very little investment has been made in tapping new wells because of hamstringing by ESG virtue signaling. As a result, we're in a pickle. The inflation we're experiencing has nothing to do with energy supply, it has everything to do with monetary, diplomatic, and fiscal policy.

AstralStorm 4y ago
I really hate it when people are spewing garbage mixed with fact. Yes, the inflation has nothing to do with energy supply, or even price of digging it all up. The pricing of it is always driven by a plausible excuse and greed. No, investment in tapping new wells is at an all time high, and for example has turned USA into a net oil exporter. Gas too. Thing is, fossil fuels are not evenly distributed, nor do we want to use them to heat up the planet more. So when a major producer is cut off or decides to do everyone in, we get a price spike, and prices rarely return to baseline.

ETH_start 4y ago

>>The people to whom the prices are “unacceptably high” are the people at the top of the pyramid who would subsequently need to pay appropriate wages. I would hazard a guess that if you took the current wages of workers which have essentially stagnated and regressed for fifty years and raised them to where they would have been had they been increasing at their pre 1970s rate, and then compared that purchasing power to where prices are at now, all of a sudden the prices of things would not seem so out of whack. There are several things are wrong with this: Wages have grown at their fastest rate in history, globally, over the last 30 years: https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-global-war-on-poverty https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/World/2016/0207... It is only in the advanced economies where wage growth has slowed. And the slowdown is much less severe than commonly believed. I personally spent years promulgating this graph all over the internet: https://imgur.com/BlEiA9d https://imgur.com/BlEiA9d I wish someone had pointed out to me in what ways this graph is misleading. This article does a good job of doing that: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-sources-real-wage-stagnation-bosworth http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-source... To summarize: 1. Wages are just one component of employment compensation. When the nonwage components - which have grown faster than wages - are factored in, you see the line track productivity growth much more closely. 2. Another factor creating the illusion of a growing gap between productivity and worker compensation is the use of different inflation indexes to measure productivity and worker compensation. The indexes largely mirrored each other before 1973, but diverged significantly since then, leading to inflation-adjusted worker compensation growth appearing artificially depressed compared to inflation-adjusted productivity growth. 3. Worker compensation growth has in fact slowed somewhat, and almost all of this slowdown can be explained by the commensurate slowdown in productivity growth in the US. >>investors are still getting ridiculous returns Investors are not getting ridiculous returns. If you look at labor's share of national income, it has largely remained the same if you exclude just one asset category: housing, where rent has increased faster than not just inflation, but income as well. See Figure 3: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_rognlie.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... And the solution to outsized gains due to housing scarcity is not to ban profiteering. It's to solve the housing scarcity problem. One study estimates that if just three cities - San Francisco, San Jose and New York - had limited the growth of their housing sector regulations to that of the median rate of all US cities, US GDP would have grown by 36 percent more between 1964 and 2009: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388