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> 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

> 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.
- javisnsi 4y ago
  Well, I suppose then I didn't understand the motive well - How does the public fossil fuel company benefit by this (its illegal to make false disclosures to investors afaik)? how do politicians across the spectrum (who keep fighting about climate change and effect of fossil fuels) benefit from this? And, just curious - on the academic front, I keep reading about effects of emissions from fossil fuel and projections for 50-100 years, why is there so little about when we run out of fossil fuels (maybe they have a motive to be quiet/lie too) but I suppose I don't see it.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    One theory: Thomas Malthus was 300 years early. None of the solutions to the problem are touchable so instead nobody does anything except protect themselves and let the horror show carry out naturally. The survivors will live prosperously for a time and the same thing will probably happen again and again and again. To be clear we will never really run out of energy but we will again and again run out of compassion.
    - rcarr 4y ago
      This is pretty much spot on. Javinsi is thinking too high level compared to how the executives and politicians think. The self interested majority (not all) do not care about these problems. They can’t act on them without risking their own positions because the solutions are unpalatable to the people they rely on to maintain their stations. Subsequently these are things to be kicked down the road for someone else to address. The politician only really cares about getting re-elected, the executive about closing the latest deal. They only care about the medium to long term in as much as it allows them to keep gaining in the short to medium term. The majority of people at this level are over 40. They likely have only 40 - 50 years left to live (we’re going with higher life expectancy because they’re wealthy). They will likely be retired in 20 to 30 years. As long as things are ok in that time frame they’re golden. Get enough money for some nice houses scattered around the world near some good golf courses. Trump is literally the archetypal representation. Look at house prices in New Zealand. They’re literally buying property there because they think in a worse case scenario, if the entire system collapses they can just ride out the storm until it either rebuilds itself or they die of old age in relative luxury. Keyword: relative. So long as they’re still in an elevated position they do not really give a fuck if things go backwards, even for themselves. And even if they do fail in the short term the consequences are negligible. Look at some failing companies from ten years ago and see what the CEO is doing now. Nine times out of ten they’re either CEO or chairman somewhere else or retired. You have to REALLY fuck up a la Elizabeth Holmes to fall out of favour of the ‘network’. You even see this in fiction. When Tyrion needs Bron’s help he won’t do it for the money: he wants a castle. Bron is smart and gets the game: if he wants to escape the life of being a hired killer for good he needs to join the nobility network, not just collect a paycheck. The castle would grant him that. Closer to home, I recently worked at a company on an application that was so slow it was bordering on unusable by the users. The engineers had been trying for years to get resources for a rebuild. Yet all the business department cared about was adding more features because they could make more money from them. This inevitably kept making the problem worse. Taking the time out to refactor the program was unglamorous and didn’t give the business department anything to show the top dogs who were clamouring for growth, growth, growth. Eventually that program will get to a point where it is unusable. The parallels with the global situation are easy to see.
roenxi 4y ago
I don't personally bother reading Tverberg articles, and I'm not about to start now. That being said, if we stick to just that quote, it is easy to justify. If you have a situation where doing a thing has worked for more than 50 years years, and there is a theory that thing is suddenly going to stop working then it is a very rare person who will stand up and say or act on that politically. Large groups of humans are devastatingly evidence-driven and can't cope with simple leaps of logic like doing the same thing will get a different outcome. So in this case, if we are about to hit peak oil and suddenly the global economy starts collapsing there is no way the politicians would sound the alarm. They'd be waiting patiently until public understanding of the matter was very high. You can see that behaviour all the way through resource problems. Politicians can't even sell spending the same amount of money as they tax; they aren't going to try and pitch doing without energy until the crisis has well and truly hit. There is no upside for them.

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.

javisnsi 4y ago
Well, I suppose then I didn't understand the motive well - How does the public fossil fuel company benefit by this (its illegal to make false disclosures to investors afaik)? how do politicians across the spectrum (who keep fighting about climate change and effect of fossil fuels) benefit from this? And, just curious - on the academic front, I keep reading about effects of emissions from fossil fuel and projections for 50-100 years, why is there so little about when we run out of fossil fuels (maybe they have a motive to be quiet/lie too) but I suppose I don't see it.
- peteradio 4y ago
  One theory: Thomas Malthus was 300 years early. None of the solutions to the problem are touchable so instead nobody does anything except protect themselves and let the horror show carry out naturally. The survivors will live prosperously for a time and the same thing will probably happen again and again and again. To be clear we will never really run out of energy but we will again and again run out of compassion.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    This is pretty much spot on. Javinsi is thinking too high level compared to how the executives and politicians think. The self interested majority (not all) do not care about these problems. They can’t act on them without risking their own positions because the solutions are unpalatable to the people they rely on to maintain their stations. Subsequently these are things to be kicked down the road for someone else to address. The politician only really cares about getting re-elected, the executive about closing the latest deal. They only care about the medium to long term in as much as it allows them to keep gaining in the short to medium term. The majority of people at this level are over 40. They likely have only 40 - 50 years left to live (we’re going with higher life expectancy because they’re wealthy). They will likely be retired in 20 to 30 years. As long as things are ok in that time frame they’re golden. Get enough money for some nice houses scattered around the world near some good golf courses. Trump is literally the archetypal representation. Look at house prices in New Zealand. They’re literally buying property there because they think in a worse case scenario, if the entire system collapses they can just ride out the storm until it either rebuilds itself or they die of old age in relative luxury. Keyword: relative. So long as they’re still in an elevated position they do not really give a fuck if things go backwards, even for themselves. And even if they do fail in the short term the consequences are negligible. Look at some failing companies from ten years ago and see what the CEO is doing now. Nine times out of ten they’re either CEO or chairman somewhere else or retired. You have to REALLY fuck up a la Elizabeth Holmes to fall out of favour of the ‘network’. You even see this in fiction. When Tyrion needs Bron’s help he won’t do it for the money: he wants a castle. Bron is smart and gets the game: if he wants to escape the life of being a hired killer for good he needs to join the nobility network, not just collect a paycheck. The castle would grant him that. Closer to home, I recently worked at a company on an application that was so slow it was bordering on unusable by the users. The engineers had been trying for years to get resources for a rebuild. Yet all the business department cared about was adding more features because they could make more money from them. This inevitably kept making the problem worse. Taking the time out to refactor the program was unglamorous and didn’t give the business department anything to show the top dogs who were clamouring for growth, growth, growth. Eventually that program will get to a point where it is unusable. The parallels with the global situation are easy to see.

roenxi 4y ago

I don't personally bother reading Tverberg articles, and I'm not about to start now. That being said, if we stick to just that quote, it is easy to justify. If you have a situation where doing a thing has worked for more than 50 years years, and there is a theory that thing is suddenly going to stop working then it is a very rare person who will stand up and say or act on that politically. Large groups of humans are devastatingly evidence-driven and can't cope with simple leaps of logic like doing the same thing will get a different outcome. So in this case, if we are about to hit peak oil and suddenly the global economy starts collapsing there is no way the politicians would sound the alarm. They'd be waiting patiently until public understanding of the matter was very high. You can see that behaviour all the way through resource problems. Politicians can't even sell spending the same amount of money as they tax; they aren't going to try and pitch doing without energy until the crisis has well and truly hit. There is no upside for them.