Starts off very general and shallow, but has some interesting insights on the carbon bubble and the current “administration.”
The Carbon Lobby and the Trump Gang
For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.
How would you maintain this confidence?
- You’d dispute climate science — making scientists’ predictions seem less certain in the public mind— and work to gut the capacity of scientists to continue their work (by, for instance, defunding NASA’s Earth Sciences program).
- You’d attack global climate agreements, making them look unstable and weak, and thus unlikely to impact your businesses.
- You’d attack low-carbon competitors politically, attempting to portray the evidence that they can replace high-carbon industries as fraudulent (or at least overly idealistic).
- You’d use every leverage point to slow low-carbon industrial progress — for example, by continuing massive subsidies to oil and gas companies, while attacking programs to develop new energy sources.
- You’d support putting a price on carbon, since this makes you look moderate and engaged, but you’d make sure that the definition of a “reasonable” price on carbon was so low and took so long to implement that it was no real threat to your business, and at worst would replace the dirtiest fossil fuels with others (switching for example from coal to gas).
- You would ally with extremists and other sources of anti-democratic power, in order to be able to fight democratic efforts to cut emissions through the application of threats, instability and violence.
Most of all, you’d invest as heavily as possible in new infrastructure and supply. For oil and gas companies, this means new exploration and new pipelines. Why would you do this, if you know you may have to abandon these assets before they’ve paid off? Two reasons: First, it sends a signal of confidence to markets that you expect to continue to grow in the future. Second, it’s politically harder to force companies to abandon expensive investments than it is to prevent those systems from being built in the first place — the mere existence of a pipeline becomes an argument for continuing to use it. This, too, bolsters investor confidence. (Note that whether these assets are eventually abandoned or not is of little concern to current investors looking to delay devaluations).
Here’s the kicker: If you were going to put in place a presidential administration that was dedicated to taking these actions, it would look exactly like what we have now: a cabinet and chief advisors in which nearly every member is a climate denialist with ties to the Carbon Lobby.
Them Chinese hoaxsters are at it again:
DeepT
3204
How long until the North Pole is an Alternative Fact?
Clay
3205
Sweet. Now we can bribe our way into mineral-rich war zones and exploit the land and people.
MikeJ
3206
Drill baby drill? What a fucking pathetic statement on the human race.
These tree-infested towers look cool:
A drop in the bucket as far as global carbon emissions go, I suppose, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
[quote]Representatives from a coalition of veteran Republican officials — including five who have either served as treasury secretary or as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers — met Wednesday with White House officials to discuss the idea of imposing a national carbon tax, rather than using federal regulations, to address climate change.
The newly formed Climate Leadership Council — which includes James A. Baker, Henry Paulson, George P. Shultz, Marty Feldstein and Greg Mankiw — is proposing elimination of nearly all of the Obama administration’s climate policies in exchange for a rising carbon tax that starts at $40 per ton, and is returned in the form of a quarterly check from the Social Security Administration to every American.[/quote]
If we take deregulation as a given under the Trump administration, then this sort of thing seems like about the best option available to combat carbon emissions. I can’t imagine it’ll have any broad-based support, though.
[quote]Here’s the blunt reality: the pressure to cut emissions and respond to a changing climate are going to alter what we do and don’t see as valuable. Climate action will trigger an enormous shift in the way we value things.
If we can’t burn oil, it’s not worth very much. If we can’t defend coastal real estate from rising seas (or even insure it, for that matter), it’s not worth very much. If the industrial process a company owns exposes them to future climate litigation, it’s not worth very much. The value of those assets is going to plummet, inevitably… and likely, soon.[/quote]
The article then goes on to detail the various ways in which Trump’s cabinet appointments and policies match up to keeping the value of those assets. I don’t think this is news to much of anyone, but I found it to be a well-written summary.
Wait, they’re gonna give US the money? Ha! Now we know for sure that’s not gonna happen.
JD
3211
In other unsurprising news…
Hope Elon Musk invents FTL in the next 4 years!
MrGrumpy
3213
Remarkable essay on climate change:
Of all the despicable things the runaway ghost train of the Trump administration has done in its first ferocious weeks, the attempt to utterly destroy every instrument of environmental protection is perhaps the most permanent. The appointment of fossil fuel tycoons and fanatical climate change deniers to key positions in energy and foreign policy, the immediate reinstitution of the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines, the promise to pull out of the Paris Climate Pact—all moves crafted to please the oil magnates who helped put him in power—these are changes that will hasten the tick of the time bomb under civilization as we know it. Racist laws can eventually be overthrown, and even a cultural backslide toward bigotry and nationalism can be slowly, painfully reversed. We don’t get a do-over on climate change. The vested interests agitating to strip the planet for parts know that, too—and they plan to profit from this particular apocalypse as hard as they can.
For anyone who grew up in the Cold War, the apocalypse was a simple yes-no question: either it was coming, or it wasn’t. Many people I know who grew up before the end of the nuclear arms race describe this as oddly freeing: there was the sense that since the future might explode at any point, it was not worth the effort of planning. Climate change is species collapse by a thousand cuts. There will be no definite moment we can say that yes, today we are fucked, and yesterday we were unfucked. Instead the fuckery increases incrementally year on year, until this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, not with a bonfire, but with the slow and savage confiscation of every little thing that made you human, starting with hope.
It is hard to outline the contours of a future you have never been allowed to imagine—one that is both different from today but accessible from it, too. The best we have been permitted to hope for is that the status quo be scraped to the edges of the present for as long as it lasts—a vote to run the knife around the empty jar of neoliberal aspiration and hope there’s enough to cover our asses. If people cannot imagine a future for themselves, all they can measure is what they’ve lost. Those who believe in the future are left, as they always were, with the responsibility of creating it, and that begins with an act of faith—not just that the future will be survivable, but that it might, somehow, maybe, be an exciting place to live.
Daagar
3215
See, in a few years when they say “Nothing to see here” they won’t technically be lying…
Tim_N
3216
So the light grey areas appear as good in say December 2013/2014 as they did in December 1984, but the thicker white areas are now almost non-existent. I imagine this is a bad thing for sea levels and polar bears?
Daagar
3217
It is ocean ice and not land ice, so no impact to sea levels. But that does nothing for the polar bears :(
CraigM
3218
So the thicker ice is the permanent ice, the lighter is the seasonal ice. What to watch is the extent of permanent ice in summer, that’s where you see the biggest changes.
THat is also the opening of the northwest passage, which has environmental and shipping impacts.
The message of the firm was “endorsed by a uniquely broad consensus of scientists in their report to the United Nations at the end of 1990,” the film’s narrator said. “If the weather machine were to be wound up to such new levels of energy, no country would remain unaffected. Global warming is not yet certain, but many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible. Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.”
Despite its awareness of the effects of climate change 26 years ago, Shell spent $22 million in 2015 lobbying against policies that protected the environment from carbon emissions.
And a bit of good news:
In short, Canadian oil sands is struggling to remain competitive in a marketplace that has changed dramatically from three years ago.
A glaring example of this problem came from ExxonMobil this week, which announced that it had removed 3.3 billion barrels of Canadian oil sands from its books. The de-booking was notable for several reasons. First, it was remarkable given the fact that Exxon has refused to write down assets or remove reserves from its books even during the worst depths of the oil price downturn. That stubbornness led to an SEC investigation into the oil major’s accounting practices, as well as an inquiry from the New York Attorney General. The regulatory scrutiny certainly influenced the latest disclosure.
But the de-booking is even more interesting because of what it says about Canada’s oil sands. Exxon removed 3.3 billion barrels from its books, admitting that the oil is simply not profitable to produce with today’s prices. It’s a pretty damming admission: the oil will ultimately be left in the ground unless oil prices substantially rebound. The project was equivalent to 15 percent of the company’s entire proved reserve base.
Exxon’s announcement came shortly after ConocoPhillips also removed oil sands reserves from its books. Conoco de-booked 1.15 billion barrels of oil sands a day before Exxon, taking the oil company’s reserves to a 15-year low.
I don’t have the context to know how to feel about the Canadian oil sands thing. Should I start freaking out about peak oil again?
Well, the oil sands are almost as bad as coal as far as carbon emissions, so not utilizing them is good. If we had to worry about peak oil, they wouldn’t have debooked the oil sands.
It does mean that the Keystone XL pipeline-- which Trump just approved, will be pretty useless.
