The Telegraph (of all papers) ran an article recently headlined as follows:
Fossil industry is the subprime danger of this cycle
The cumulative blitz on energy exploration and production over the past six years has been $5.4 trillion, yet little has come of it
The nub of the article was that this investment was wasted money. If there was oil to be found it could not be extracted anyway without burning the planet. In other words, this is money being wasted in an investment boom that is bound to crash. I think that is right.
The FT has not noticed, saying this morning:
Those tasked with overhauling Britain's fiendishly complicated North Sea tax regime could do far worse than look at Norway.
About a decade ago, it was facing a similar problem to the UK — a worrying slowdown in oil exploration.
For a country so reliant on oil and gas revenues, that had troubling implications for its state finances.
So with attention focussed on the minutiae and not the big picture the wrong policy is pursued without any apparent understanding that that hope that underpins it is forlorn.
When will the world realise we cannot burn our way out of global warming? The future is renewable energy and the investment in it, and not oil, is what is needed now, especially when state money is involved.
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The Government’s policy is in a mess; particularly in respect of Solar.
http://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1300327/judge-overrules-pickles-solar-farm-refusal
The future is renewable energy and the investment in it, and not oil, is what is needed now, especially when state money is involved.
The day when container ships and air ambulance helicopters run on renewable energy is the day we can probably stop looking for oil.
Do you have any idea how boring arguments in absurdum are?
Yes. But they can be effective in highlighting a point to laymen.
In this case the argument was just crass
I never said there was no use for oil
Only a fool would
I said what we find will have to stay in the ground so investing in finding it is wasted money
We have reserves enough already in other words
Interesting (if somewhat frustrating) links. Imagine what could have been achieved had that money been invested in genuine energy solutions.
This is an part of a wider problem highlighted and publicised by the Carbon Tracker Initiative and publicised as a ‘carbon bubble’
http://www.carbontracker.org/site/carbonbubble
I said what we find will have to stay in the ground so investing in finding it is wasted money
What we find will get produced. That is a certainty.
We have enough reserves already in other words
Who does, exactly? ExxonMobil – the world’s largest private oil company – would run out of oil within about 14 years if it does not discover or buy into new reserves.
Odell you do reveal your spots
Confusing the interests of one company with those of the planet is, I suggest, something close to potentially catastrophic – and why we will face one if we are not careful to ignore such messages
No, you misunderstand me. I presented ExxonMobil as an example. All oil companies, save for possibly Saudi Aramco, are in the same position. If they don’t explore, discover, and replace their reserves they will stop producing in a 10-20 year time period. This is why it is important for exploration activities to continue.
I a m assured by wise people in this sector – such as Jeremy Leggett – that this is just not true
I am confident he is right
The majority of reserves we now have will have to stay in the ground to prevent catastrophe
Sorry, what isn’t true? That oil companies don’t need to replace their reserves?
What is nor true is that the world has only 14 years of reserves
If it was cars being built now will have no fuel before their life cycles are complete
Now there is an idea
Are you saying that?
No, I’m saying that at current production rates the major oil companies – with the possible exception of Saudi Aramco and maybe KOC – have about 10-20 years production left. By way of example, ExxonMobil has approximately 14 years of reserves on it’s books at current production rates.
I am told by those with widely regarded expertise something quite different
Okay, fair enough. But should your sources be wrong, and I be right, it would explain why the oil companies are spending billions on exploration activities, wouldn’t it?
No
Because we can’t burn what we already have
What we have will be burned with an absolute certainty, insofar as they can be recovered from the reservoirs. The economic point at which oil companies will stop producing oil due to lack of demand has not been reached, and likely will not be for several decades at least. There is not a single oil company, save for Saudi Aramco, which is not producing its reserves as fast as possible.
And that’s what’s already worrying
Capitalism has moved into the next phase where it does stuff purely for profit & not to achieve anything. Government projects, are created out of sales strategy (thin air). Any excuse to get the UK taxes into Corporate hands; HS2, obsolete aircraft carriers, Trident, fracking, wind farms, Euro fighters, surveillance state.
And they abandon anything of use; nuclear fusion, battery cars because of the gas/oil lobby.
The intellectual laziness of the arguments of the pro-carbon lobby is matched only by the nihilistic indifference of their actions.
As the empirical paucity of the attitudes of the climate change deniers becomes ever more obvious they are shifting from ‘it’s not true’ to ‘so what?’.
‘So what?’ indeed. Their collusion with the world’s banking elite and Governments, and control of the media (if I hear one more media commentator say they ‘don’t want to go back to living in a mud hut ‘, I swear I’m going to build a mud hut and wall them up in it) enables them to fiddle away happily while Rome burns. They care nothing for the planet we will leave to our children.
But what is all too frequently ignored in the debate is the effect the industry has on the world beyond the environmental.
The truth is that the fossil fuel industry can be seen to be the single most destabilising influence on the planet. Our dependence on oil and gas leaves us at the mercy of rogue states, gangsters and warlords. It enfeebles our industry and agriculture, leaving them a’prey to the vicissitudes of global energy markets, and makes a mockery of what we laughingly call diplomacy. Would our response to Putin’s aggression In Georgia and Ukraine have been quite so puerile had we in Europe not been reliant on Russian gas? (It’s worth noting here that exactly this was the subject of the former KGB Lieutenant-Colonel’s Doctoral thesis). Would the Middle-East and the Levant be in its current state of turmoil were it not for fossil fuels? We speak of Religious extremism in the region without pausing to acknowledge that it is born of the economic disparity created in those countries, and the readiness of the developed world to support the most vile and repressive dictators, as long as they kept the oil flowing.
We learned,at great cost, the importance of self-reliance in two world wars. Until we divorce ourselves from our heroin-like addiction to fossil fuels, we might as well just save the money we spend on defence and forget about a trident replacement.
“if I hear one more media commentator say they ‘don’t want to go back to living in a mud hut ‘, I swear I’m going to build a mud hut and wall them up in it”
ironically, the mud huts would probably be more energy efficient and forward looking! The building industry at present is locked into wasteful building methods to keep its supply chains and profits at a certain level and continues to build houses that are energy sieves -another example of how the market takes too long to change and adapt and prefers waste to sacrificing profit streams.