Why Is the Oil Industry Still Thriving?
Why Is the Oil Industry Still Thriving?
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.
Insufficiently ruinous Eco terrorism
Soon
If you ever want to feel disgusted head over to Google Earth and check out Midland, Texas. Every square you see is an oil pad.
Where is Captain Planet when we need him?
All must be sacrificed to the parasite class's cult of Big Number Always Goes Up.
… money
Because you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time ... and they've been at it for a very long time.
They don't need to invest in new production any more, so that capital investment money is now pure profit.
Sadly, they are in fact investing in new production.
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.
I blame them too, but bigger blame adheres to those who own the fossil-fuel companies, and to the politicians who let the fissil-fuel owners buy them off.
There's some weird links between american christianity and oil. At the very least a bunch of the people who got rich off of oil also tended to be devout christians, and used their money to support evangelizing christianity and oil dominance.
There's a number of different reviews for "Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America"
This is an especially detailed one. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kim-phillips-fein-anointed-oil/
I found the book and it's reviews after noticing just how biased toward the republicans the owners of the oil companies tended to be. Other large businesses tend to play both sides in politics, but the owners of the oil companies really seem to be really into the traditional gender hierarchies.
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.
Do we not run on gas? I know we're transitioning, especially China https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024/trends-in-electric-cars
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.
The reason those products were adopted was because the raw materials were available chaply as by products of fossil-fuel production. We'll have to substitute, and will still use some petroleum to produce feedstock for a while. But substitution, efficiency improvements and replacement are normal parts of a working economy. As fossil-fuel derivatives become more costly, we'll ditch them.
Shipping is a separate problem: the logistics and transport sector will be slower to decarbonize because of the long lifetimes of its capital goods.
We're still using fossil fuels, and not phasing out as fast as possible.
Chinese power generation has produced more CO2 this year than ever before. They're also bringing renewables online, but electricity usage has risen too. So we're closer to turning the corner, but haven't done so yet.
https://youtu.be/zZ-lMDtiI-k?si=gAf8unl2IqUJXNBR USA and China both emit insane amounts of co2 but the population difference...