Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.
Andres Malm suggests in his book "Fossil Capital" that part of the reason that fossil fuels (stocks of energy) are so profitable is that you can pick and choose when to extract and then again when to release the energy stored in them, which will always be more profitable than, for instance, wind and solar (flows of energy) because you can manipulate production to prevent over supply, and choose when to release energy instead of waiting for the energy to be available in the flow. The higher capability to profit means that they will remain more profitable than renewables long after any other sort of calculation other than "profitability" would favor the renewables (cost to produce, damage to the environment, ability to satisfy energy demand).
I blame the young earth creationist christians who think that humans are incapable of destroying gods creation, and that the increasing planetary instability means that god will return and put them in charge any day now.
We see a bunch of things happening. First of all the West attacked and keeps attacking Russias oil production and exports with sanctions, due to Russias invasion of Ukraine. That means we actually have one of the biggest oil producers and exporters being taken out of the game. Something similar happened with Venezuela and Iran previously. So we actually see declines, just not choose by the countries themself, but mainly by the US, to keep out competition. At the same time 2023 oil consumption is 1.7% above 2019 oil consumption. The pandemic had a massiv effect on the industry and a lot of production is being restarted. However we also see EVs starting to have an impact. There are also a lot of other pushes mainly by net oil importers to reduce oil consumption. This seems to start to actually hurt the industry.
If I had to guess, we probably see the next reduction in oil production in the Middle East. Not due to the governments wanting to produce less oil, but due to a war in the region.
It’s way more than cars. Plastics, chemicals, energy, shipping, fertilizers, pesticides, even food additives can trace their ingredients to oil and gas. We’ve structured our whole society around oil since World War I, and getting out of it isn’t going to be easy.
A lot of it, is due to having waste products from refining crude oil, which could be turned into something usefull. So when you transition away from combustion engine cars, you increase the costs of other oil based products.
Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though
Because many consumer goods are made out of plastic derived from petroleum feed stock? Because it's still more energy-dense than other forms of energy? Because people don't want to have a lower quality of life? Because ICE cars still have more range and affordability than electric? Because the power-grid reliability is not easy to have faith in? Because people are still being born? Because extreme weather necessitates the need to have natural gas generators? My brother, is a staunch environmentalist. After he had babies, he is now, buying, boxes of diapers, regularly, and the trash bin becomes full of them. Single-use plastic, and before, he HATED single-use plastic. He was the most, anti, single-plastic-use KNIGHT EVER! SO NOBODY, IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT, CONSISTENT, IN THEIR SO CALLED BELIEFS. EVERYBODY MAKES CONCESSIONS. You are typing away at a plastic keyboard, because plant-based keyboards, don't exist, yet. But yes, all food additives derived from petroleum, should be replaced with their plant-based counterpart, not because of carbon, which is a benign element, but because of health. Also, the majority of modern medicine and pharmakia uses petroleum derived chemicals, yet, naturopaths, and pharmaceutical-skeptics, vaccine-skeptics, are denigrated by the left. So ya.
.....or maybe massive lobbying, subsidies, corruption and fear mongering? No, that can't be it. A trillion dollar industry would never do unethical things to cling to their power.