Another Message Board
Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here
I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging platform. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack.
John Quiggin 
Shipping emissions
The EU is moving ahead, at the pace but with the force of a glacier, to include shipping in its carbon trading system. from 2025. Ships arriving in EU ports from or sailing from them to non-EU countries will pay half the within-EU rate. Press report https://www.euractiv.com/section/shipping/news/in-world-first-eu-legislators-agree-to-price-shipping-emissions/, procedural weeds https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/package-fit-for-55/file-revision-of-the-eu-emission-trading-system-(ets).
The agreement is a political deal between the EU institutions. Legislation requires the Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament to all sign on, and it looks as if this has now happened. Things can still go wrong before formal adoption of the fine print, but this is unlikely as both environmental NGOs and European shipowners, led by the giant Maersk, accept the deal.
Is the global scope of the measure imperial overreach? Possibly, but the UN’s global shipping forum (IMO) has been captured by the industry and the wretched flags of convenience, and is not fit for purpose. Shipowners trading between Australia or China and Europe will have no choice but to comply. The Australian government does have a choice: doing nothing, or pressing to extend carbon trading to all Pacific shipping. Plan B is the right way to go.
Example of “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
Is this Insanity from
1790 or 2021?
“Efforts to launch vaccination campaigns foundered in the face of rampant misinformation, competing business interests and a [pandemic]-weary public.”
😷 💉 👍
“How smallpox inoculation united America
“Government responsibility for public health shaped the fledgling nation’s concepts of freedom.
“And then that commitment disintegrated. By 1800, a vaccine had emerged. It contained the cowpox virus — related to smallpox and thus capable of generating immunity against it, but incapable of passing between humans, and so with no risk of seeding outbreaks. Suddenly, administration of the vaccine did not pose communal risk; therefore, its distribution did not inspire communal action.
“Efforts to launch vaccination campaigns foundered in the face of rampant misinformation, competing business interests and a smallpox-weary public. (Sound familiar?) Outbreaks continued, albeit at a much slower pace than before, and the United States — once a proud leader in smallpox immunizations — slipped behind its counterparts in Europe and beyond. Wehrman flies through this part of his story, but after the three years we’ve just had, it feels so familiar that more detail seems unnecessary.
…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04334-8
Oil, gas & coal price caps or…
“We need a new Bretton Woods – but this time it must be truly inclusive”(^fn1.) as;
“The world was denied its economic recovery while speculators continued profiting.”
From:
“Dollar Dominance is Financial Dominance
…
“Clearly, thus, it is urgent to establish a more sensible regulation of energy markets, including making explicit plans for the reduction of fossil fuel consumption. It is crucial that those plans be made together with producers to avoid taking advantage of periods of extremely low prices to leverage a power that disappears as soon as the price trend reverses. That should go hand in hand with an intensification of international cooperation to support global liquidity, public investments for development, adaptation, and mitigation of climate change (UNCTAD 2019, 2022, Gallagher and Kozul-Wright 2021)
[^fn1. A New Bretton Woods]
“As is often the case, the idea is not new. “Between the 1940s and the 1950s, some prominent economists were called upon by international institutions to contribute to [a very similar] debate including: John Galbraith, Nicholas Kaldor, Albert Hart, Mordecai Ezekiel, Gerda Blau, Jan Tinbergen, Richard Kahn, James Angell, and Colin Clark”
…
By Orsola Costantini
NOV 23, 2022 | MACROECONOMICS
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/dollar-dominance-is-financial-dominance
^fn1.
“We need a new Bretton Woods – but this time it must be truly inclusive
:Our global economic system is failing. We need a fresh start to address the inequities of the past 80 years
Richard Kozul-Wright
Kevin P. Gallagher
11 July 2022,
…”such as rescinding the dispute resolution arrangements in bilateral and regional trade agreements known as Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms.
“Corporate power, as much as government policy, is a major distortion in the trading system”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/global-economic-crisis-new-bretton-woods-janet-yellin/
Maybe, (or not – JQ?) this goes some way to answer JQ here;
“There are other ideas in Marx that might be developed to yield a better theory of crisis, but nothing resembling a systematic theory.”
“Marxian economics MIA?
by JOHN Q on JANUARY 6, 2010
https://crookedtimber.org/2010/01/06/marxian-economics-mia/
This well researched, argued and referenced loooong article must certainly be required reading especially for ecological economists & philosophy of economics. Is it?
*
“The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity
by John Bellamy Foster
…
“Science, however, has progressed far beyond this point, and while sometimes still presenting nature in teleological terms, it is more likely to resort to mechanical, systemic (systems theory), or dialectical terms.68 The last of these most fully captures the universal metabolism of nature, encompassing its different integrative levels—including the inorganic and organic, the extra-human and human—connected with the results of human praxis.
*
“The sources of these changes are not simply anthropogenic (something that will not be reversed so long as industrial civilization continues to exist), but are due more concretely to the worldwide expansion of capitalism as an accumulative system geared to its own internal growth ad infinitum and embodying in that respect the most destructive relation to the earth conceivable. This was captured by Marx’s theory of metabolic rift, now raised to the level of an anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.70
…
“It is important to understand that this Earth System crisis in the Capitalinian is tied to the long history of expropriation and exploitation that together constitute the foundation of capitalism’s relation to the earth and humanity.”
…
(Dec 01, 2022)
Topics: Ecology Marxism
This article is the 2020 Deutscher Memorial Lecture, delivered each year by the recipient of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, and which was awarded in 2020 to John Bellamy Foster for The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020). The lecture was first published inHistorical Materialism 30, no. 2 (2022): 3–28. It has been revised for publication in Monthly Review, with the consent of Historical Materialism and their publisher, Brill.
https://monthlyreview.org/2022/12/01/the-return-of-the-dialectics-of-nature/
h/t Lambert at naked capatalism
Follow John Bellamy Foster with Cory Doctorow (shorter paragraphs, as much information distillation)
on:
“Monopoly’s event-horizon”
…
“Here, Boyle sharply disagrees with Keller and Tarkowski’s argument, grouping it with similar claims about content moderation and censorship, arguing that openness was only ever a necessary – but insufficient – precondition for a better world. In the same way, online speech forums might be terrible places, but this is a failure of their moderators and their communities and their business-models, not an indictment of the idea of online discourse itself.
“Both papers grapple with concentrated corporate power as a corrupting force, but neither puts it in the center of the breakdown of otherwise sound practices.
“Reading all these people whom I respect and admire so much debating whether “openness” is good or bad makes me even more certain that fighting concentrated corporate power is the precondition for success in all other goals.
“Fighting concentrated corporate power may seem like a tall order, and it is, but in that fight, we have comfort in a key idea from Boyle’s own work.
“Boyle describes the history of the term “ecology.” Before this term was in widespread use, it wasn’t clear when two people were engaged in the same struggle. If you care about endangered owls and I care about the ozone layer, are we on the same team?
“What do charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?
“The term “ecology” turns these issues (and a thousand more) into a movement.
…
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/05/eldritch-physics/#wouldnt-start-from-here
*
When o when is crooked timber going to do a seminar series on Cory Doctorow?
84 days already under house arrest. Enough?
First they came for Coco.
Coco says “…but the punishment should not be intended to prevent all protesters from exercising their fundamental right to protest.
“Climate action will mean more people peacefully taking to the streets, not fewer, and the authorities should accept that.”
From;
“Last week, a NSW court jailed me for 15 months for a peaceful climate protest. Hear my story
By Guest author Violet Coco
Dec 6, 2022
…
“I spent three days in a cell in the remand centre. Then upon signing bail I was under 24 hour curfew conditions for 20 days in a small apartment with no garden. After 20 days effectively under house arrest, my curfew hours changed – at first I could leave the house for only 5 hours a day for the following 58 days, then 6 hours a day under house arrest for the following 68 days.
“This totalled 2017 hours imprisoned in my home for non-violent political engagement in the prevention of many deaths. Cumulatively, that is 84 days or 12 weeks of my freedom.
“Now I am in prison, for engaging in democracy. Please donate to help me with my appeal of these unjust laws.
https://johnmenadue.com/last-week-a-nsw-court-jailed-me-for-15-months-for-a-peaceful-climate-protest-hear-my-story/
“You can read the original version of this statement and donate to Violet’s legal fund here.”
https://chuffed.org/project/95028-get-violet-out-of-prison
KT2, The thousands of motorists held up for 25 minutes on the Sydney harbour Bridge deserve a vote here. Do you need to inflict inconvenience on people to make your voice heard. Might not be an enormous inconvenience damage but maybe $100,000 worth of aggravation and maybe, indeed, the damage from climate inaction is in the trillion dollar range (yes both figures pure guesses but maybe orders of magnitude correct). But no-one actually stopped her from protesting – she can exercise her voice virtually anywhere. Just not in a way that disrupts the community and which probably generates disaffection for the environmental movement. .
Let’s see – Violet Coco is sentenced to 400 days in jail, Jordan Shanks has his home bombed, Danny Lim is assaulted and seriously injured by NSW police, Drew Pavlou is chucked out of Parliament House because of orders from on high in the AFP – and if that isn’t enough, buy the latest Quarterly Essay and read the correspondence that JQ and others have written in response to the previous QE, then see if you don’t think there are some worrying trends in terms of threats to democratic liberties, and some clear evidence of where the most serious of these threats are coming from.
Paul Norton, thank you – “then see if you don’t think there are some worrying trends in terms of threats to democratic liberties, and some clear evidence of where the most serious of these threats are coming from.”
Harry said “But no-one actually stopped her from protesting”.
Do you understand “chilling effect” Harry? I assume no one is stopping protesters in Iran, North Korea or Afganistan either.
Coco has decided not to bring children into the world on her perception of risk to climate and future generations. Headline 2100 “Tax base ruined due to dwindling population and climate catastrophes “.
HC: “Might not be an enormous inconvenience damage but maybe $100,000 worth of aggravation and maybe, indeed, the damage from climate inaction is in the trillion dollar range”.
But what if we, in your terms, are so expunged by onerous antiprotest legislation, we get a China, Iran, now Indonesia etc level of incaceration and chilling effect on democratic shenanigans?. Where does the “stop this” action start?
And the applied discount rate to $100,000 agrivation vs …
– “natural disasters will cost Australia $73 billion by 2060, under a low emissions scenario.” – “extra 73 deaths per 100,000 people annually by 2100″ ”
– Insurance now in 2022 “cost every Australian household an average of $1532.”
Of the $100,000 ‘inconvenience’ it took just 64 people at $1532 extra insurance cost this year to equal the inconvenience. Has anyone told those held up on the bridge such a figure?
Harry, here are 3 – The Business Roundtable, The Climate Council and The Insurance Council of Australia, clipped from web search results.
“Update to the economic costs of natural disasters in Australia”
australianbusinessroundtable.com.au › …
“The report estimates that natural disasters will cost Australia $73 billion by 2060, under a low emissions scenario. This is significantly higher than the $39 …”
THE COMPOUNDING COSTS OF CLIMATE INACTION
http://www.climatecouncil.org.au › uploads
“Even after factoring in efforts to adapt to a changing climate, the study still projects an extra 73 deaths per 100,000 people annually by 2100 – which is …”
“New research shows every Australian pays for extreme weather
insurancecouncil.com.au › resource › ne…
8 Sept 2022 · “New research released today shows that extreme weather events over the past 12 months cost every Australian household an average of $1532.”
“Climate change could cost U.S. $2 trillion each year by the end of the century, White House says ”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/climate-change-could-cost-us-2-trillion-each-year-by-2100-omb.html
Your great grandchildren will thank Coco Harry.
Harry Clarke: – “The thousands of motorists held up for 25 minutes on the Sydney harbour Bridge deserve a vote here. Do you need to inflict inconvenience on people to make your voice heard.”
Professor Terry Hughes tweeted on Dec 5:
Harry, who’s jailing the key people responsible for anthropogenic climate change, that’s propelling humanity on a trajectory towards civilisation collapse before 2100?
Professor Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre at Manchester University said earlier this year, from time interval 0:25:38:
“And I find it disturbing and interesting in the Law that we still, that we will protect things that are causing incredible damage, and we will prosecute things that are trying to stop that damage being caused.”
Another landmark for electric cars. The Indian conglomerate Tata has been selling a subcompact pure BEV in its domestic market, the 4-seater Tiago, for a shade above US$10,000. Specifically, 849,000 rupees = US$ 10,318. This is big news for a BEV with a very respectable 250 km range. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/12/06/the-10k-tata-tiago-ev-gets-20000-bookings-in-india-in-just-2-months/
The petrol Tiagos are from 545,000 to 790,000 rupees, or $6,642 to $9,598. India has quite high EV subsidies from both the central and state governments ( https://www.tatacapital.com/blog/vehicle-loan/state-wise-ev-subsidies-in-india/ ). It looks as if these will bring the car into rough price parity.
There is no indication that Tata plan to export the car, but it’s a huge multinational company and must be considering the option. There must be a large market in rich countries for small second electric cars.
Development economists will point out that any subsidy to a four-wheel vehicle in India is a redistribution upwards to the urban middle class. Dalits in Bihar won’t see any of the money. Sure. The other way of seeing this is that middle-class subsidies and favourite-son industrial policies are a fact of democratic life, and in this case they are usefully addressing the climate crisis. Not to mention the public health crisis in Indian cities from air pollution.
Harry, does the climate issue worry you at all, beyond the worry of the climate issue upsetting business as usual, ie that it is pro clean energy anti-fossil fuels climate politics that is harmful?
I don’t see any signs in Mr Dutton or Littleproud or Perrottet (and only minimal signs with Albanese) that a profound threat (promise? certainty?) of serious irreversible harms from global warming really engage them at all. I don’t see your criticism of the people holding positions of public trust and responsibility supporting the fossil fuel industry with utter disregard of climate consequences, of which policing protesters is surely the least of the support they get, which even extends to taxpayers paying for their greenwashing out of emissions reductions funding.
Making climate politics about the protesters and not the industrial scale perpetrators has been a big part of Doubt, Deny, Delay politics. Whilst green-left activists may have been understandably pleased to have lots of the public attention on them and their preferred solutions it is dismaying that so much of mainstream politics and media – too much media being political players rather than objective reporters – aided and abetted the association between fringe extremist politics and the climate issue. And I don’t doubt the expectation was the climate issue, all the way to the scientists and their advice, would be brought into disrepute by that association; it surely was not because anyone expected their preferred solutions to actually work. I remain buoyed by those successes – a case of innovation by smart people trying really hard delivering results. Which ought not be such a surprise.
The new mining … of pollution “Sucking Carbon From the Sky”.
A bit like bitcoin – proof of work and trust in outcome “for a technology it says could one day suck tons of carbon from the sky.”.
Of which Toly Rinberg says “are aligning with the narrative and incentives from polluting industries and for-profit interests,”
Just. Stop. Producing Co2.
Fortunately, the IEA Renewables 2022 report says – “Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2 400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today”.
*
IEA.
“Renewable power’s growth is being turbocharged as countries seek to strengthen energy security
06 December 2022
“The global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years, overtaking coal as the largest source of electricity generation along the way and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, the IEA says in a new report.
“Energy security concerns caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have motivated countries to increasingly turn to renewables such as solar and wind to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels, whose prices have spiked dramatically. Global renewable power capacity is now expected to grow by 2 400 gigawatts (GW) over the 2022-2027 period, an amount equal to the entire power capacity of China today, according to Renewables 2022, the latest edition of the IEA’s annual report on the sector.”
https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2022
https://www.iea.org/news/renewable-power-s-growth-is-being-turbocharged-as-countries-seek-to-strengthen-energy-security
*
Toly Rinberg quoted in;
“Big Oil Is Once Again Throwing Money at Sucking Carbon From the Sky
…
“Experts have estimated that capturing just 1 gigatonne of CO2 — on the lower end of ranges of necessary carbon capture set out by the IPCC — using direct air capture would gobble up 10% of the world’s total electricity consumption. It’s clear we’re going to make the process a lot more efficient.
“both Shell and Norwegian oil giant Equinor have helped a new Israeli direct air capture startup, called RepAir, raise a cool $US10 ($14) million in funding — despite the company only having a shoebox-size prototype for a technology it says could one day suck tons of carbon from the sky.
“Climeworks, which operates the world’s largest direct air capture plant, currently prices its removal at 1,000 euros ($US1,050 ($1,458)) per ton.
…
“My position is that people calling for the double-digit gigatonne scale carbon dioxide reduction, whether they like it or not, are aligning with the narrative and incentives from polluting industries and for-profit interests,” Toly Rinberg, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University specializing in the science and governance of carbon dioxide removal, told Earther earlier this year. “By saying that carbon dioxide reduction will be big in the future, it reduces political pressure to sharply decarbonize today.”
“There’s also the question of whether or not direct air capture will ever be profitable, or if it should be “…
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2022/12/big-oil-is-once-again-throwing-money-at-sucking-carbon-from-the-sky/
KT2, you refer to: “…and helping keep alive the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, the IEA says in a new report.”
I’d suggest that’s fantasy.
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-methane-set-another-record-during-2021
In the YouTube video titled SR Australia – Social and Earth System Tipping Points | Prof. Will Steffen + Dr. Nick Abel, published 3 Apr 2022, executive director of the Australian National University (ANU) Climate Change Institute, Professor Will Steffen said from time interval 0:19:12:
“So, if you look at the projected temperature rise from the IPCC, by 2050 – middle of the century – thirty years out – even under the most, ah… drastic emission reduction scenario they assess, we’ll still hit 1.6 [°C]. This is dangerous territory. As I said before, we’re on track to reach somewhere around 2.7 to 3 [°C], by the end of the century. But these other scenarios will reach 2, or have reached 2 [°C], ah… at mid… even by 2050. So, um… the… Even the IPCC is saying we’re entering dangerous territory, unless we do something really drastic. So, it’s virtually certain that we will breach 1.5 [°C] before the… ah, before the middle of this century. Some people think even by 2035, we can reach 1.5 [°C].”
The table presented in Prof Steffen’s slide as he was talking was sourced from the IPCC AR6 WG1 SPM, Table SPM. 1, on page 14.
We could possibly see the first +1.5 °C global mean surface temperature threshold breach in all of human history as soon as 2024, if a strong El Niño emerges in 2023-24.
Click to access AugustTemperatureUpdate.22September2022.pdf
A new “battery” (language hijack) for renewable energy profitization… Bitcoin mining!
A Freedom Battery!
Only in Texas. – “Texas is all about freedom,” says Andy Long, CEO of crypto mining company White Rock. “So Texas and Bitcoin go hand-in-hand.”
“Freedom”‘s just another word for… Texas, Batteries & Bitcoin?!
*
“A Row Erupts Over Texas’ Bold Bitcoin Battery Plan
“Bitcoin miners say they can help stabilize a shaky power grid and prevent blackouts. Experts say it will make the problem worse.
…
“Demand for energy in Texas is set to skyrocket as a result of Abbott’s plan. Miners in the state are currently using around 2 gigawatts (GW) of energy, with peak capacity for the state topping out at 80 GW. By 2026 it’s estimated that Texas bitcoin miners will draw as much as 29 GW—four times as much as the whole of New York City.
“For the opportunity to test his theory, Abbott has the Chinese Communist Party to thank. When China banned crypto mining in June 2021 (outwardly for environmental reasons), some of the world’s largest miners—including Marathon Digital Holdings, Riot Blockchain, Core Scientific, Argo Blockchain, and others—either set up shop or expanded operations in Texas.
“The miners were attracted to Texas for its cheap power, plentiful supplies of renewable energy, and hands-off approach to regulation. The libertarian ambitions of the cryptocurrency movement, as laid out in the original Bitcoin white paper, also dovetail neatly with the state’s identity. “Texas is all about freedom,” says Andy Long, CEO of crypto mining company White Rock. “So Texas and Bitcoin go hand-in-hand.”
…
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-texas-power-grid/
OPEC oil + other liquids production appears to be past peak. See tweet @crudeoilpeak posted today including graph of OPEC crude and other liquids production 1997 – Nov 2022:
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).
We don’t even have the language settled yet. “The language of carbon sequestration is yet to settle. An agreed set of terms would help address misunderstandings and inconsistencies.” ^1.
Trees and soil look suspect for a final soak up of “Residual emissions by 2050 are only quantified in 20 strategies and most of them use forests to achieve national net-zero targets”.
From “Long-term national climate strategies bet on forests and soils to reach net-zero” below.^2.
*
^1. (This report was supposed ro be published in October 2022)
“Australia’s Carbon Sequestration Potential – Roundtable consultation
…
– “Nature-based sequestration activities bring co-benefits (e.g. for biodiversity) but are vulnerable to natural disturbances, with risks of reversal likely to increase under climate change.
…
– “The language of carbon sequestration is yet to settle. An agreed set of terms would help address misunderstandings and inconsistencies.”
…
“The Authority intends to publish anInsights policy paper in the first quarter of 2023 setting out its analysis and policy actions on how Australia can achieve its carbon sequestration potential.”
https://www.climatechangeauthority.gov.au/news/australias-carbon-sequestration-potential-roundtable-consultation
*
2.
“Long-term national climate strategies bet on forests and soils to reach net-zero
Abstract
“The deployment of carbon dioxide removal is essential to reach global and national net-zero emissions targets, but little attention has been paid to its practical deployment by countries. Here, we analyse how carbon dioxide removal methods are integrated into 41 of the 50 Long-term Low Emission Development Strategies submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), before 2022.
“We show that enhancing forest and soil carbon sinks are the most advocated strategies but are only explicitly quantified in 12. Residual emissions by 2050 are only quantified in 20 strategies and most of them use forests to achieve national net-zero targets. Strategies that quantify both residual emissions and carbon dioxide removal identify national constraints, such as wildfire risks to forests and limited geological CO2 storage capacity.
“These strategies also highlight the need for international cooperation. Taken together, we suggest that the UNFCCC should urgently strengthen its reporting requirements on long-term national climate strategies.
Introduction
“As net-zero becomes an organising principle of climate policy, countries are beginning to consider the practical and policy dimensions of deploying Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and the implications for achieving national climate targets…. Despite being central to net-zero ambitions, CDR is rarely made explicit in policy plans7.
“We present a systematic analysis of CDR in 41 (of 50) long-term national climate strategies submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) before the start of 2022. These cover 58% of global 2019 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions8 and around 74% of global GDP9.
“CDR has largely been analysed within global assessments, attracting debate regarding the credibility and sustainability of CDR methods if deployed at scale10,11. CDR, however, will largely be delivered by individual countries through national climate policies. National analysis is therefore required to understand the practical questions of deployment, policy, and governance12,13. CDR methods are characterised by different potentials and limitations, including cost, readiness, energy requirements, permanence, and social and political acceptability14,15,16. These may be implicit or arise from their national or local configuration and policy design17,18. Domestic policies to incentivise CDR deployment need to be designed within these considerations, requiring different types of policy depending on the CDR method, moving from research and development towards full integration within new or existing policy mechanisms13,19. National considerations combine with an urgent need to scale-up CDR methods ahead of 2050, to match the giga-tonne scales projected to be required to meet the 1.5 °C or 2 °C Paris Agreement temperature target20.
“CDR has a role in achieving global (or national) net-zero by counterbalancing residual emissions from difficult to decarbonise sectors in the mid-century4,13. The trading of removals between countries may also be required for certain countries to reach their net-zero targets, owing to the level and make-up of residual emissions from economic sectors and country-level biophysical, social, or political limits4,21. There is a need, therefore, to consider the adoption of national net-negative targets as well as policy mechanisms to facilitate international transfers21,22,23. These dynamics suggest a decisive role for national governments in realising CDR, yet to date there are few comparative studies into CDR in national net-zero planning1,2.
…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00636-x
If I see a truly wise and pithy statement, which I identify with, I may post it here from time time.
“Caring about Australian politics/social policy etc perpetuates the cycle of abuse. I’m like some monkey in a 60s psych experiment trying to get the cruel parent to care for me. Ain’t going to happen. Australia will always be a weedy time lagged clone of the current hegemon.” – Greg Hooper (on Twitter).
Ikon quoted “Australia will always be a weedy time lagged clone of the current hegemon.” – Greg Hooper
(So serendipitous Ikon)
Zhuang Zi says “… which I guess means our greatly esteemed master here still has a lot of tangled weeds clogging up his thinker!”
Enfeoffed (fn^1.).
Politicians enfoffed techbro entrepreneurs enabling surveillance capitalism “Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy [ Enfoffment ] are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy [ collective imagination ] can undo it.”.(fn^2.)
Imagination. How to think to use a thing individually, collectively and with or without imagination. An example of bounded rationality.
What follows by Zhuang Zi is an extremely good discourse on collectivism, imagination, catagory errors and enfoffmemt. (And if I were Ikon, I may even suggest monism 😊)
Chapter 1.
“Wandering Far and Unfettered
…
“We’ve been washing silk for generations and have never earned more than a few pieces of gold; now in one morning we can sell the technique for 100. Let’s do it.” The customer took the balm and presented it to the king of Wu. When Yue started a war with him, the king made the man a general who led his soldiers through a winter water battle with the men of Yue and won a big victory. The man was then enfeoffed as a feudal lord. The power to keep the hands from chapping was one and the same, but one man used it to get an enfeoffment and another couldn’t even use it to avoid washing silk. The difference is all in the way the thing is used. You, on the other hand, had a gourd of more than 100 pounds. How is it that you never thought of making it into an enormous vessel for yourself and floating through the lakes and rivers in it? Instead, you worried that it was too big to scoop into anything, which I guess means our greatly esteemed master here still has a lot of tangled weeds clogging up his thinker!”
…
Zhuang Zi
“Chapter One: Wandering Far and Unfettered
From ‘Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings’ (2009), translated by Brook Ziporyn
With a new commentary by Alan Jay Levinovitz
https://aeon.co/classics/on-the-path-to-improvement-follow-the-jester-not-the-sage
*
fn^2.
“How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet
“Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy [ Enfoffment ] are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.
…
“The neoliberal consensus was that commercial surveillance on the Internet was a business like any other: best to let the market sort out the details. Both of these moments reflect the increasingly anti-democratic nature of communications policy-making in the United States. As Patricia Aufderheidenotes, “the public is endlessly invoked in communications policy, but rarely is it consulted.”
“McNamee’s framing of Silicon Valley’s moral failure hews closely to Zuboff’s influential theory of “surveillance capitalism.” Zuboff’s premise is that the relationship between technology, business, and consumer data under surveillance capitalism represents a marked deviation from prior modes of economic production. For Zuboff, capitalism has gone “rogue.” Much like diagnoses that ignore the net’s political foundations, this positiondisregards historical continuities to focus only on what is new. Although the magnitude of contemporary commercial surveillance is certainly mind-bending, the system reflects enduring structural imperatives within a capitalist political economy dependent on perpetual growth. As Douglas Rushkoff notes, when we point to “corruption” as the source of technology woes, “we are implying that something initially pure has been corrupted by some bad actors.” Concentrating on bad actors often means ignoring the political economic forces that have incentivized surveillance advertising and so fabulously rewarded its most successful practitioners.
“Neil Postman once proposed that the first question to ask about a new technology must be: “What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?” Adding another layer of inquiry, Raymond Williams arguedthat “the key question about a technological response to a need is less a question about the need itself than about its place in an existing social situation.” In other words, what matters is not only who shapes technology and for what purpose, but also the social position of both the shapers and the purposes.
“Surveillance advertising has been developed as a tool to help marketers understand, predict, and control consumer behavior. It is a technological response to a concrete business problem: How do we sell more stuff as efficiently as possible? But surveillance advertising also reflects a broader set of deeply rooted social needs within the capitalist political economy. To answer both Postman and Williams: history shows that the structural problem surveillance advertising is meant to address is the accumulation of capital, arguably among the most pressing needs of the most powerful people in our society for quite some time.
…
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-capitalism-not-a-few-bad-actors-destroyed-the-internet/
fn^1.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enfeoff
JQ tweeted yesterday (Dec 8):
Then conceded with the following tweet:
Perhaps JQ might like to review BZE’s Zero Carbon Australia High Speed Rail Report (2014) costings to reflect current & likely 2030 circumstances? See Section 2: Regional travel model, particularly:
* Figure 20: Business passenger air fare and HSR Premium fare price structures.
* Figure 21: Other passenger air fare and HSR Economy fare price structure.
* Table 10: HSR and air fare comparison
https://bze.org.au/research_release/high-speed-rail/
Evidence/data I see indicates petroleum-based aviation fuel is only going to get more expensive, and thus air travel will get much more expensive. I’d suggest air travel is becoming a luxury.
KT2 – I remain deeply doubtful of the effectiveness of Carbon Capture and Storage of any sort for anything apart from providing excuses for delaying emissions reductions.
That offset schemes appear to be more scam even than they are empty gesture doesn’t surprise me. Soil carbon, reforestation, avoided land clearing make sense but not as emissions solutions; diminishing returns way before they reduce CO2 concentrations in any noticeable way seem very foreseeable. FF industry CCS is pure greenwash – like Gorgon’s use of it to take CO2 out of low quality gas so it is more saleable – and get taxpayer funding for it sounds bizarre but that’s what has been happening. Cowed or compromised, Labor looks as ineffectual – unwilling – to call it out as our “fossil fuels forever” LNP.
Cynical of me perhaps, yet the widespread commitment to leveraging every opportunity for delay over urgent emissions reductions – a LibNatLab tripartisan position – looks all too real and the impediments to CCS at climate relevant scales look insurmountable. Start with proposing levies on commerce and industry for a “future CCS fund” at the levels of funding it would actually require and just watch how ferocious the objections get and how willing to fund campaigning to prevent it.
Geoff Miell said:
“Evidence/data I see indicates petroleum-based aviation fuel is only going to get more expensive, and thus air travel will get much more expensive. I’d suggest air travel is becoming a luxury.”
All the evidence I see says exactly the opposite. Obviously the reaction to the pandemic has screwed up a lot of short term economic forecasting and output, but the trend for the price of oil is down. The price of oil is now where it was in 2018 and 2006 and heading lower.
I’ve done a lot of travel for pleasure all my life and the real price of airfares has relentlessly fallen. Recent screwey airfares are entirely due to the economic disruption caused by the pandemic and perhaps the war in Ukraine.
I have said for many years that the price of oil ( a major factor in airfares ) is highly unlikely to stay above $100 – $120 for any length of time. The reason for this is quite simple – there are now a lot of alternatives compared to 50 years ago. Fracking in the US and elsewhere completely destroyed the OPEC oil cartel and can be switched on or off more or less at will. A LOT of fracking is economical at $40 – $70 a barrel. There is also a ton of natural gas and there is now a much greater ability switch from oil to gas if required.
Finally, both wind and solar are ramping up quickly. In the next few years EV’s and Electric trucks will start to really moderate oil demand. Oil producers know that their assets are at risk of being stranded as the oil age fades away and will do everything they can to keep pumping.
It is my guess that long distance aviation will be one of the last industries to be reliant on oil. Considering that the aviation sector consumes only 6% of the total oil consumed, I don’t see that as a problem.
Ken Fabian, just to state plainly, I too am “deeply doubtful of the effectiveness of Carbon Capture and Storage of any sort for anything
… and agree that it is used for making money and “providing excuses for delaying emissions reductions.”
And I am just doubtful re bio sequestration as it seems potentially ephemeral.
“inconvenience is not a sufficient reason to prohibit it. It’s immoral and unjust.” Josh Pallas, the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties said.
First the came for a “74-year-old retiree and grandmother Elizabeth Hartrick, who came to Sydney as part of the protest.
“Hartrick tells the Guardian she had stayed back from the more dramatic actions during the protest, but was tracked down by police the next day.
“I hadn’t been told to leave the road, I wasn’t in that situation,” she says.
“After her arrest she was held in custody for 30 hours, and then subjected to strict bail conditions – including non-association orders with other members of Extinction Rebellion – before her next court hearing in March.
“It feels very unsettling, I run through different scenarios. Would they take into account the fact that I’m a pensioner, that I’m elderly?” she says.
“How would I look after my flat? How do I look after my personal affairs, do I have to give someone power of attorney of bank accounts? I think, what the hell would I do? And then if I did go to prison, I think, ‘geez, could I really handle that?’ It’s just a really horrible kind of demoralising feeling.”
“The arrests followed the establishment by NSW police of Strike Force Guard”…
[Then they came for]; “Coaldrake was one of six women and three men – aged between 53 and 81 – to be the first people charged for disrupting Queensland parliament for more than 30 years, harking back to an era when the sunshine state was led by the notoriously repressive premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
” But Josh Pallas, the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, says the sentence is “outrageous”.
“Peaceful protest should never result in jail time,” he says.
“It’s outrageous that the state wastes its resources seeking jail time and housing peaceful protesters in custody at the expense of taxpayers. Peaceful protest sometimes involves inconvenience to the public. But inconvenience is not a sufficient reason to prohibit it. It’s immoral and unjust.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/10/violet-coco-is-not-alone-the-climate-activists-facing-jail
Our deformation laws need a rewrite. Even going as far as seeking aswers to a “publisher believe it is in the public interest? This involves an exploration of the journalist’s and the publisher’s state of mind – a subjective exercise.”
*
“What sort of country are we? That’s the question implicit in Lachlan Murdoch v Crikey
Richard Ackland
“For Australian media, this case is important – it asks whether anyone is free to publish in the public interest a hyperbolic remark about a wealthy media baron
…
“If the mediation fails, then the fractured state of American democracy and Fox’s role in amplifying it will be played out in an Australian court.
…
“There’s an objective question – is an allegation about a connection between Fox News’ apparent election denialism and the uprising at the Capitol a matter of public interest?
“If it is, did the defendant publisher believe it is in the public interest? This involves an exploration of the journalist’s and the publisher’s state of mind – a subjective exercise.
…
“In the UK or the US, such a claim brought by Lachlan Murdoch would struggle to make headway.
In Australia, it gets the red carpet with multiple days of case management, and disputation over pleadings and discovery.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/10/what-sort-of-country-are-we-thats-the-question-implicit-in-lachlan-murdoch-v-crikey
I do think Coco lighting flares and setting prams on fire are less than optimal, even counterproductive as forms of protest; it got publicity but less sympathy than other forms of protest, even inconvenient and disruptive sorts.
But I also see climate protesting as primarily a reaction to and symptom of systemic societal/governmental/corporate failures to grapple with the climate problem. Where those all consistently and systematically support an enduring “right” to pollute at large scale without accountability the likelihood of protest grows – and being against the rules becomes the rule for protesting – it makes more disruptive protesting more likely and more likely to have a lot of public support.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “All the evidence I see says exactly the opposite.”
What evidence, Joe?
US petroleum geologist suggested in his tweet on Sep 28:
Per BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy-2022, on page 15, the top five oil producing countries in 2021:
#1 USA: _ _ _ _ _ 16,585 kb/d annual average (18.5% global share)
#2 Saudi Arabia: 10,954 kb/d (12.2%)
#3 Russian Fed: 10,944 kb/d (12.2%)
#4 Canada: _ _ _ _5,429 kb/d (6.0%)
#5 Iraq: _ _ _ _ _ _ 4,102 kb/d (4.6%)
Most of world oil production growth has come from USA since 2010.
Since 2008, nearly all US oil supply growth has come from ‘tight’ oil.
“Tight’ oil is a light oil that doesn’t have the longer hydrocarbon chain molecules suitable for producing heavier fuels like diesel and bunker fuels.
Since the COVID pandemic the only “tight’ oil production growth has been from the Permian Basin, while all other US ‘tight’ oil plays are either flat or declining. US tight oil drilling productivity has been declining since Feb 2021.
Data indicates Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production has already plateaued and it may be beginning to decline. Ghawar, Saudi Arabia’s (and the world’s) largest oil producing field passed peak (above 5 Mb/d before 2008) and has been steadily declining since. It seems Saudi Arabia’s oil production can’t be sustained near or above 11 Mb/d for very long.
Data indicates the Russian Federation’s crude oil production may have plateaued. It seems Russia’s oil production can’t be sustained above 11 Mb/d for very long.
Russia was a major diesel fuel producer before its invasion of Ukraine. Less diesel from Russia has exacerbated global diesel supply shortages. Western sanctions on Russia will disrupt access to critical technologies needed to maintain
Data indicates Canada’s crude oil production has been steadily rising over the last decade (from 3,515 kb/d in 2011, 4.4% per annum). It seems Canada may still have room for further growth in crude oil production, but for how much longer? Will Canada’s oil production growth be enough to offset the ongoing oil production declines from many other post-peak countries?
The Asia-Pacific region has passed peak oil production.
OPEC crude + other liquids has passed peak production (see my earlier comment above Dec 8). OPEC and non-OPEC allies, a group often referred to as OPEC+, decided at their first face-to-face gathering (on Oct 5) in Vienna since 2020 to reduce production by 2 Mb/d from November. What if the OPEC+ alliance’s decision to cut oil production by 2 Mb/d from November 2022 is because OPEC+ cannot meet or sustain its Oct 2022 quotas?
Most oil producing countries/regions are now in decline. There are some countries/regions at production peak and a diminishing number of pre-peak oil producing countries/regions. The world is fast running out of pre-peak oil producing countries/regions.
Global crude oil supply is already constrained, and particularly for global supplies of gasoil/diesel fuels. With China showing signs of coming out of COVID lockdown, demand for more petroleum fuels is likely to rise.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “Fracking in the US and elsewhere completely destroyed the OPEC oil cartel and can be switched on or off more or less at will.”
Nope. In 2014, U.S. decline rates were about 22% annually. Today, decline rates have increased to 43%. More new wells are required to be drilled now just to maintain current production. Data shows that for 2019, the production-weighted average from well start to first oil production was about 4½ months. It further shows that the average lag from first oil to offset of legacy production decline is about 7 months. That means that future production for the next six to twelve months is locked into lower drill rig counts.
See Art Berman’s post 15 Jan 2021 titled DUC2K: DRILLED UNCOMPLETED WELLS WON’TSAVE U.S. OIL PRODUCTION.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “I’ve done a lot of travel for pleasure all my life and the real price of airfares has relentlessly fallen.”
Not now. Say goodbye to cheap airfares, Joe. I’d suggest they are not coming back anytime soon!
The Internet is a very strange place. Newest experience for me: Instagram is a very strange place. It seemed a smart move to install for usefull information flows, because you know once people organicing stuff are below a certain age, they cant use normal websites or emails anymore, but its also hughely unhealthy in particular when certain vulnurabilities already exist. Don´t even want to think about the core market. Seems so much healhtier to contain onself to this monday message board when a strange urge to write stuff on the internet occurs. Btw, at the end of the day it seems to me instagram is for women looking at womens pictures, admireing other women that they perceive as being more attractive to men as opposed to targeting men.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “There is also a ton of natural gas and there is now a much greater ability switch from oil to gas if required.”
For aviation, that would require substantial infrastructure change, and likely significant range reduction due to lower energy density. Methane gas is not a ‘drop-in’ fuel alternative to Jet-A1 kerosene aviation fuel.
https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/aircraft-propulsion/can-aviation-use-liquified-natural-gas-reduce-its-carbon
Nevertheless, humanity needs to be rapidly reducing GHG emissions ASAP, not finding new ways to burn more hydrocarbon fuels.
Geoff Miell,
I am just about to book a return flight SYD MIAMI for may. At $2000 it is the lowest I’ve ever paid ( in real terms ) to East Coast USA.
A quick glance shows that if you are a real cheapskate you can fly UK return for about $1300.
Considering the economic disruption caused by various factors, these prices are amazing.
I’ll get to your other points later.
Just disruptive greedy humans, a bit of code and a new wild west frontier of enclosure to foreclose. Sans equitable and socially stability inducing regulations.
The robot tag is misnomer.
But definitely – tax the capital & robot beneficiaries.
1 person owns 58,000 houses.
1 corp owns 80,000
“Even Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has bought into the remote management trend with Arrived Homes, a platform that buys up houses and offers shares to real-estate speculators hoping to turn a profit.”
*
“Robot Landlords Are Buying Up Houses
“Companies with deep resources are outsourcing management to apps and algorithms, putting home ownership further out of reach.
…
“Imagine Homes is an example of an “automated landlord,” a company that uses new data tools and technologies to minimize the costs of on-site human labor while collecting profits from rental properties. They are essential to the new and growing sector of companies backed by Wall Street investment firms that buy up thousands of single-family rental homes across several states.
…
” Soon, new securities-backed companieswere buying vast quantities of small homes (many of them foreclosures) with plans to rent them out. Some of these companies have ballooned into behemoths. Invitation Homes, the largest,has more than 80,000 houses in 16 metro areas. American Homes 4 Rent, founded by self-storage magnate B. Wayne Hughes, has more than 58,000 in 22 states. Even Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has bought into the remote management trend with Arrived Homes, a platform that buys up houses and offers shares to real-estate speculators hoping to turn a profit.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7eaw/robot-landlords-are-buying-up-houses
More disruptive humans hiding behind novelty.
Don’t worry if you cant buy a house, this AI will craft one for you.
From blocks.
In cyberspace.
And I helped train it!
For negative return on my equity!!!
And now they will steal – oops – scrape “a vast and untapped source of training data.”
Do you think this will build a real house or fix homelessness or global heating? In time?
*
“OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.
“The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
…
“The team’s approach, called Video Pre-Training (VPT), gets around the bottleneck in imitation learning by training another neural network to label videos automatically. The researchers first hired crowdworkers to play Minecraft, and recorded their keyboard and mouse clicks alongside the video from their screens. This gave them 2,000 hours of annotated Minecraft play, which they used to train a model to match actions to onscreen outcomes. Clicking a mouse button in a certain situation makes the character swing its ax, for example.
“The next step was to use this model to generate action labels for 70,000 hours of unlabeled video taken from the internet and then train the Minecraft bot on this larger data set.
“Video is a training resource with a lot of potential,” says Peter Stone, executive director of Sony AI America, who has previously worked on imitation learning.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/25/1063707/ai-minecraft-video-unlock-next-big-thing-openai-imitation-learning/
Geoff
I looked at that YouTube video re high airfares. It demonstrates quite clearly that current high airfares are due to a lack of capacity and other factors entirely caused by the (over) reaction to the pandemic, not oil prices. In fact you can book a flight to NZ from Sydney in May for $340 return, which is cheaper than I paid 5 years ago. The video is a typical beat up by the ABC with punters shocked that airfares are so high – right in the middle of peak season, right after the largest economic disruption in living memory and right after people have been unable to travel for nearly 3 years. Well, duuh?
Why you would offer me this video as evidence that flying is going to be a luxury in the future due to high oil prices, I’ll never know.
Your post that aviation will find it difficult to change to gas is entirely beside the point. I stated that many industries can, therefore freeing up oil for those that can’t. Unless there are real innovations, aviation will likely be one of the last industries to still use oil. I fact I would expect aviation to gradually use an increasing percentage of a declining consumption of the stuff. And the usual suspects will get increasingly upset that ‘aviation consumes most of the worlds oil’.
As to the peak oil hypothesis – I think we have already hashed that out. Yes there is a peak, and it may well have already passed, but this is due to decreasing demand rather than lack of supply. Tony Seba has a lot on this. The thing is, old, dying industries can still cause some disruption because investors will be reluctant to invest in a dying industry, so it is inevitable that there will be some dislocation as the economy adjusts to the new reality.
My main point is however, that oil will rarely, if ever, see sustained prices over $120 ( more like $60 – $80) or so again. The economy can easily absorb that sort of price. This has been true for at least 10 years and probably longer. There are just too many alternatives and high prices like that will just cause a faster change to all electric. Oil producers basically know this and aren’t bothering to do much more than keep the current system running for as long as possible. They are investing in the alternatives instead. Don’t forget the BP changed its name from “British Petroleum” to “Beyond Petroleum” in 2000 – well over 20 years ago.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “I am just about to book a return flight SYD MIAMI for may. At $2000 it is the lowest I’ve ever paid ( in real terms ) to East Coast USA.”
I’d suggest you check the fine print to see whether there’s ‘wiggle-room’ for the airline to cancel your booking, or to charge you extra, with any significant fuel price rise closer to your departure date.
Per Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airfares-key-routes-rise-by-much-25-2023-amex-gbt-2022-12-08/
An interesting analysis from Goehring & Rozencwajg Associates, dated 7 Dec 2022, on the question of why US shale drilling remains so muted despite higher prices, concluded with:
There’s a reference to an in-depth study of Tier 1 acreage in the Midland and Marlin Counties in the Permian Basin indicating these could be fully developed by 2030 at a development rate of 50 wells per month, or in as little as 4 years at 100 wells per month.
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/why-wont-energy-companies-drill
It seems to me, from the accumulating data/evidence I see, the day of reckoning is fast approaching. Yet most people are still ‘energy blind’ and hope that air travel will go back to what it was like before COVID emerged.
K2 –
That Vice article gives an OK overview of the trend for large companies in the US to be buying up real estate but their interpretation of what is going on is – as typical for Vice – completely ass backward. These large companies – and pension funds – didn’t start buying these homes in a vacuum. This is a direct result of the Quantitative Easing that has been going on since 2008 or so. This QE has been very narrowly focused, mainly treasuries and mortgage backed securities – the US federal government is now the largest purchaser of these securities. The result is higher home prices, which is great if you are a home owner but not so much if you aren’t.
Sophisticated investors with large amounts amounts of cash, or large corporations and pension funds, can see this and are thus buying up these properties. But it is very important to understand that this is the direct effect of government policy, not not some new outcome of ‘Capitalism’. The fact that there are endless articles blaming everyone and everything but the US federal government is telling just how brain washed most people really are.
The answer of course is that if the government needs to QE they should give the money direct to everyone as a UBI. Not only would the benefits be much more widely dispersed, rather than going directly into asset prices thus benefiting already wealthier people, the amount of QE needed would be far less due to the increased velocity of the money injection.
As an aside, there are a few other reasons that could be added to the real estate mix. Real Estate investment is increasingly a mugs game for regular people ( I was one ). The rules and regulations in many places are increasingly onerous. Almost the whole book has been thrown at this sector, including various forms of rent control and ‘tenants rights’ etc. During the pandemic many, many places basically told tenants they could stay for free and not get evicted and landlords could just suck it up. Is anyone surprised that large corporations are much better able to navigate this and push back? Yet people want more regulation…
I could go on, but Kartik Garda on YouTube has a lot of info on this, if you are interested.
“Would Bill Gates, in his heart, have been less of a rapacious monopolist if market domination carried the real, proximate threat of nationalization? ”
Steve Randy Waldman
From;
“Tackling inequality from the demand side
…
“One way the rich demand wealth flows is by accumulating market power, escaping or restraining competition, whether as sellers of outputs or buyers of inputs. The extent to which our economy is now controlled by monopoly is extraordinary. The rich have demanded, and we have accommodated, an era of “chokepoint capitalism“, as Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow put it.
“But we can make them want to do that less, if we make the costs and risks of engendering chokepoints higher. In the previous post, I suggested nationalizing the freight rail industry. (I’m not alone!) But won’t that turn us into Soviet Russia or something, if private assets can be force-purchased arbitrarily by the overweening state? Well, not if it isn’t arbitrary.
“The legitimacy of private sector economic power is based on the claim that competition will discipline it in the public interest. When that claim holds, then the state generally should leave firms in the private sector. But as soon as competition becomes perhaps less than vigorous, municipalization or nationalization should be on the table, front and center. We need to flip the incentives surrounding “antitrust”. Under the status quo, firms seek to limit competition as much as they can get away with, while regulators play whack-a-mole with very proportionate (usually much less than proportionate) remedies. Instead, what we want is for industries themselves to ostentatiously ensure they are open and competitive, because the threat of eminent domain hangs above dominant firms if it seems like they are not.
“Would Bill Gates, in his heart, have been less of a rapacious monopolist if market domination carried the real, proximate threat of nationalization?
…
https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9713.html
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “Your post that aviation will find it difficult to change to gas is entirely beside the point.”
You raised it in the context of finding alternative fuel solutions for aviation. It seems to me now you are dismissing it as an irrelevancy to attempt to distract from your apparent ignorance, aye Joe? 😉
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “I stated that many industries can, therefore freeing up oil for those that can’t. Unless there are real innovations, aviation will likely be one of the last industries to still use oil. I fact I would expect aviation to gradually use an increasing percentage of a declining consumption of the stuff. And the usual suspects will get increasingly upset that ‘aviation consumes most of the worlds oil’.”
Nope, “freeing up oil for those that can’t” indicates to me your ignorance of how the petroleum oil industry works. From a Nov 17 post by petroleum geologist Art Berman titled ENERGY AWARE #4: THE DEVIL IS IN THE DIESEL, it included (bold text my emphasis):
https://www.artberman.com/2022/11/17/energy-aware-4-the-devil-is-in-the-diesel/
Similarly, crude oil is not an a la carte menu in which you can just order kerosene/jet fuel but tell the waiter to hold the gasoline/petrol, bunker fuel and diesel. Ignorance is bliss, aye Joe? 😉
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “As to the peak oil hypothesis – I think we have already hashed that out.”
Still in denial of the overwhelming evidence/data, aye Joe? 🙄
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “Yes there is a peak, and it may well have already passed, but this is due to decreasing demand rather than lack of supply.”
Diesel fuel prices are currently at a near all-time high – Australian weekly national average retail price peaked at 236.2 cents per litre (week-ending Oct 30).
https://aip.com.au/pricing/Diesel/National/National-Average
US diesel fuel inventories are at “historic lows”.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-Diesel-Inventories-Hit-Historic-Lows-At-The-Worst-Possible-Time.html
It looks like a lack of diesel fuel supply problem to me. And diesel is the workhorse of the global economy.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “The economy can easily absorb that sort of price.”
High fuel prices drive high inflation. High inflation is already diminishing some people’s spending power.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “There are just too many alternatives and high prices like that will just cause a faster change to all electric.”
Not while the mining and transport of minerals required for the all-electric transition are still dependent on diesel fuels.
Geoff,
Can you give me a link to the historical price of diesel so that I can check your claim the WORLD price of diesel is at or near an all time high?
I use TradingEconomics.com to check world prices of commodities and they don’t seem to include diesel for some reason. They do include heating oil which is similar but I don’t want to get caught up in a war over definitions. The historical price of heating oil is currently no higher than it was 10 years ago and is falling, though it was higher early this year no doubt due to the war in Ukraine.
Prices of other oil based products listed on trading economics.com also show no particular trend over the last 10 years, going up and down due to various factors that don’t really gel with the idea that there is a shortage due to peak oil. Even the articles you link to never show this, often saying the reasons are political/economic.
Thanks!
Geoff,
This McKinsey report shows that it is indeed possible to alter the output mix of refineries. Nobody said that you can just click your fingers to ‘make it so’. It requires capital investment and time so can’t really fix short term problems. But we aren’t talking about short term problems – or are you?
“… these two developments [lower demand and changing mix] pose a dual challenge for the world’s more than 600 refiners. Lower overall demand means less need for refining capacity. At the same time, the remaining refining capacity must evolve to match a shift in product mix to meet petrochemical demand. Refiners will need to find ways to make much less gasoline, marginally less diesel, and more jet fuel and petrochemical feedstocks.”
Doesn’t sound like that big a deal.
You said: “Not while the mining and transport of minerals required for the all-electric transition are still dependent on diesel fuels.” This is already happening. Or are you talking short term vs long term? Sometimes I find it hard to tell.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “Can you give me a link to the historical price of diesel so that I can check your claim the WORLD price of diesel is at or near an all time high?”
I’d suggest there isn’t a “WORLD price” for diesel. Can’t you ‘google’, Joe? 😉
EIA average weekly retail price chart for US #2 diesel ultra-low sulphur, 2007-2022: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=EMD_EPD2DXL0_PTE_NUS_DPG&f=W
EU average weekly retail fuel price charts (gasoline 95, diesel, LPG) by selected countries, 2019-2022: https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices
Asia average weekly retail fuel price charts (gasoline 95, diesel, LPG) by selected countries, 2019-2022: https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices-asia
Looks to me like US, European countries, and most Asian countries for diesel fuel prices referenced (except producers Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, & Malaysia) are currently near all-time highs.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “They do include heating oil which is similar but I don’t want to get caught up in a war over definitions. The historical price of heating oil is currently no higher than it was 10 years ago and is falling, though it was higher early this year no doubt due to the war in Ukraine.”
US #2 heating oil average weekly price has gone up – all-time peak (so far) at US$5.902 per gallon (week-ending 7 Nov 2022) – per EIA data chart, 1990-2022. Now down to US$4.861 per gallon (w/e 5 Dec 2022).
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “Prices of other oil based products listed on trading economics.com also show no particular trend over the last 10 years, going up and down due to various factors that don’t really gel with the idea that there is a shortage due to peak oil.”
Global gasoil & diesel fuel production peaked at around 26 Mb/d during 2015-18, and has since steadily declined to below 23 Mb/d by mid-2021, per a graph in a blog post titled The peak of diesel: 2021 edition (written originally in Spanish & translated by google into English), dated 19 Nov 2021, at crashoil.blogspot.com.
The chart suggests to me that global gasoil/diesel fuel production has already passed peak, well before COVID emerged, and certainly well before Russia invaded Ukraine. COVID masked the gasoil/diesel fuel shortage by reducing some demand, but the Russian invasion exacerbated it, as Russia was/is a major diesel fuel producer.
Joe ‘Bitcoin’ Blow: – “Even the articles you link to never show this, often saying the reasons are political/economic.”
Joe, did you actually read & understand the Nov 17 post by petroleum geologist Art Berman I referenced above in my previous comment?
Joe, did you understand the significance of Figure 2. The general molecular structure of propane, butane, gasoline and diesel? If crude oils, like the US light ‘tight’ oils, contain much smaller proportion of longer-chain hydrocarbon molecules, then refineries cannot produce as much bunker, gasoil & diesel fuels from them – see Figure 8. Potential Intermediary Products of Different Oils.
Then there’s this statement by Art Berman:
Joe Blow: – “Doesn’t sound like that big a deal.”
🤣🤣🤣 Ignorance is bliss, aye Joe?
In my earlier comment (at DECEMBER 10, 2022 AT 11:31 AM) I refer to Art Berman’s tweet that suggests “World oil production to decrease from 101 mmb/d in 2023 to 80 mmb/d in 2040”
From a Resilience.org post on Aug 3, headlined The Status of Global Oil Production (Part 1):
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-08-03/the-status-of-global-oil-production-part-1/
Resource depletion is inevitable. The critical question is what will be the global crude oil production decline rate? Will it be 2% per annum? 3%? 4%? 5%? 6%, or more? We might be able to handle 2-3%, but I’d suggest anything more would likely be increasingly more catastrophic. We won’t know until after it begins happening.
Dr. Robert Hirsch said on 7 Nov 2012, from time interval 0:21:54: “If you take a look at the likely decline rate of world oil production, we’re talking about something of the order of 5%. Maybe it’s 4%, maybe it’s 6%. It’s going to be very complicated, depend on a whole variety of different parameters, and you assume that the best we can do (which is this world-wide crash programme) is implemented. This is the kind of situation you’re talking about over a ten-year period. And the reason for that, very simply, is the decline starts ahead of your mitigation. And so the things that you’re going to do to mitigate have to chase after something that’s in the process of decline.”
Geoff,
Sorry, but graphs for just the last 3 years won’t cut it. You need at least 10 years to show a decent trend. Also why are you giving me retail prices for diesel? Retail prices contain taxes and are subject to various economic factors. In fact if you go to another section of that website you can find the spot price for New York No. 2 diesel and it is no higher than 10 years ago! And falling rapidly! And you reckon I can’t google. Lol.
You said: In my earlier comment (at DECEMBER 10, 2022 AT 11:31 AM) I refer to Art Berman’s tweet that suggests “World oil production to decrease from 101 mmb/d in 2023 to 80 mmb/d in 2040”.
Yep – due to lower demand, not supply. Peak demand is about now or maybe a bit in the past. More like a plateau.
You keep insisting that diesel supply is a real looming LONG TERM problem, thus proving there is not enough oil left to pump, then give me articles and quotes that show no such thing. Yes refineries are optimised for a certain output mix, and there have been virtually no new refineries built in the US for 50 years, but that doesn’t mean that there is some sort of peak oil. It means that the industry – at least in the US – is slowly declining and that new investment is scarcely worth it.
Joe Blow: – “Sorry, but graphs for just the last 3 years won’t cut it. You need at least 10 years to show a decent trend.”
So where are your 10-year period graphs then, Joe? 😉
Joe Blow: – “Also why are you giving me retail prices for diesel?”
That’s what most people pay when they fill up with diesel. Diesel is the workhorse of the global economy.
Joe Blow: – “In fact if you go to another section of that website you can find the spot price for New York No. 2 diesel and it is no higher than 10 years ago!”
Thanks for the graph. New York No. 2 diesel prices have been highly volatile in 2022, ranging from US$2.345 per gallon at the beginning of 2022, spiking sharply in Mar 2022, followed by rapid fluctuations, with an all-time peak (so far) at US$5.198 per gallon (w/e 10 May 2022), and is still above US$3 (w/e 5 Dec 2022). I’d suggest rapidly fluctuating fuel prices don’t inspire confidence for economic investment.
Joe Blow: – “And you reckon I can’t google. Lol.”
So it’s laziness then, aye Joe? 😉
Joe Blow: – “Yep – due to lower demand, not supply.”
So why aren’t US diesel fuel prices back to around US$2 per gallon?
Why aren’t Australian diesel fuel prices back to around AU$1.60 per litre?
Why aren’t European diesel fuel prices below €1.5 per litre, Joe?
Joe Blow: – “You keep insisting that diesel supply is a real looming LONG TERM problem, thus proving there is not enough oil left to pump, then give me articles and quotes that show no such thing.”
There are none so blind as those who will not see. Data says global gasoil & diesel SUPPLY has ALREADY been declining for years & diesel fuel prices are substantially up compared with last year.
Evidence/data suggests USA crude oil production is approaching an all-time peak, if it hasn’t already passed it in 2019. The decline of ‘tight’ oil production (that has lower proportions of longer-chain hydrocarbon molecules suitable for producing bunker & diesel fuels) will then be rapid when Tier 1 reserves In the Permian Basin are fully developed, probably later this decade. The Bakken, Niobrara & Eagle Ford plays are already showing signs of production decline despite higher oil prices.
Saudi Arabia & Russia have peaked. OPEC has passed peak. Asia-Pacific is declining.
Australia peaked in 2000, with most of Australia’s petroleum production being in the form of condensate & LPG (not crude oil), that isn’t processed here in Australia (see Resources and Energy Quarterly).
Joe Blow: – “It means that the industry – at least in the US – is slowly declining and that new investment is scarcely worth it.”
Few want to invest more billions in new refining capacity, or repair damaged refineries due to storm damage from hurricanes and cyclones.
Australia’s two remaining refineries at Geelong (Victoria) & Lytton (Queensland) are propped-up by federal subsidies until mid-2027. What happens after 2027?
Meanwhile, it will take decades to transition away from petroleum fuel dependency. I’d suggest Australia doesn’t have decades.
Even if Australia had 99% EV sales by 2030, even at this pace, then 80% of the fleet would still run on fossil fuels.
What will the price of petroleum fuels be then in 2030 to operate Australia’s perhaps more than 15 million remaining ICEVs? $5/litre? $10? $20? Would there be enough fuel supply to meet demand, or would fuel rationing be required?
No big deal, aye Joe? 🤦♂️
Very interesting, James. Hmm. $10,000 for something reliable with a usable range! I would definitely consider this, if/when I find a new job. This is getting closer.
I would still prefer an option to retrofit an older car though, but, I’ll take what I can get.
Geoff,
Tony Seba reckons the switch over will be much faster than that. Also Prof Ray Wills from W.A.. Australia might lag by a few years but it is likely that 50% of new car sales worldwide will be full EV by 2026. And over 80% by 2030.
Thing is, this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Potential buyers of a new car in 2026 will see the future rapidly approaching and will be disinclined to purchase a new ICE car. If they can’t afford a new EV many of them will hold off until they get a bit cheaper, or buy a second hand ICE car to tide them over for a few years. Or buy a second hand EV.
It could be that sales of new ICE cars plummets around 2026. Would you buy a new ICE car in 2026/28? This will mean that by early/mid 2030’s most ICE cars on the road will be approaching their use by date. I would be surprised if the conversion of the car fleet to EV was wasn’t nearly over by 2035 or so. This is much faster than the conventional wisdom.