Post by jeffolie on Aug 3, 2012 15:41:58 GMT -6
This remains a big subject matter which most likely will not be resolved by titling Big Oils as Public Enemy No. 1 with the drop dead estimate to be 50 years away.
" ... overreacting alarmist? ... "
America soon enough will be overtaken as the most polluting country in the world by other countries such as India, China, Brazil plus minor contributions as manufacturing shifts from China to lower cost countries such as the Phillipines, Indonesia or wildcards in Southern Hemispheres of Africa or South America. The aggregiate total pollution from whatever goes into the air is compounded by volcanoes, animal and plant life including cattle, termites, etc. Accurate measurements have been disputed often.
Politicans sometimes are active or at other times more concerned with economic developement such as China and India wanting to achieve 1st World status. America and the EU essentially shipped some of the manufacturing to lower cost and politically willing to pollute countries.
Hating the big oil industry, the coal industry makes enthusiastic supporters politically active. The consequences often impacts the production of electricity such as Japan's shift from fear of nuke energy along with Germany's fear of nuke energy which the nuke energy industry argues adds to the dependence on polluting carbon based natural gas. Hating the oil industry shifts some of the impact to countries more willing to burn oil or refine oil and results in the oil products costing more such as burning ethanol in America based on US farmed specialty corn which is used only for ethanol and not food or feed.
"... The world’s trapped in a subtle suicide pact. Too many people, demanding too much oil, dumping too much carbon in the air spells disaster. Ten billion by 2050 can destroy the planet.
"... Jeremy Grantham of the $100 billion GMO investment firm sees one disaster scenario unfolding: The planet’s resources simple cannot feed the 10 billion population predicted in 2050. So a 200-year supply of oil is irrelevant, except maybe for new species populating the planet a few eons in the future.
======================================
Aug. 3, 2012
Big Oil is Earth’s Public Enemy No. 1
Commentary: 200-year supply but we’re all dead in 50
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — The world has “1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years,” brags Thomas Donohue, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO: “We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years, and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.”
Yes, 200 years of oil. Too bad it’ll kill us in 50 years. How? Easy, “we have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn,” says environmentalist Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone.
Reuters
The author of the 1989 classic “End of Nature” warns: “We’d have to keep 80% of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.”
Who’s right? Is McKibben an overreacting alarmist? Is Donohue too biased to trust? After all, the petroleum industry is the U.S. Chamber’s biggest source of money. Both are right. Yes, we have too much energy. Five times too much.
As a result, using more than one-fifth of it will dump so much excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that by 2050 fossil fuel companies will kill the planet. And that’s exactly what they plan to do.
The world’s behavior is now like a drug addict’s: The more we have, the more we demand, the more we love using it. Till we crash. McKibben has called this collective behavior a “suicide pact.”
Bad news: oil is the solution … to the wrong problem
First, let’s examine some independent sources, check the facts supporting the oil industry’s claims. New discoveries do tell us the Earth does have all we need for the foreseeable future … but to be fair, the same media sources also make clear that supply is not the problem … rather, demand and human behavior is the problem … and that has huge unintended consequences:
1. “Everything You Know About Peak Oil is Wrong” BusinessWeek
Charles Kenny: “We’re not running out of resources. Quite the contrary. … If we keep on using more we’ll surely run out of supplies one day. But … a long way off.”
2. “The Return of Fossil Fuels,” SmartMoney
Reshma Kapadia: “Enormous new oil and gas discoveries under American soil are having a game-changing impact on the entire economy.”
3. “King Coal’s Comeback.” Time
Bryan Walsh: “Asia needs coal, and the U.S. has plenty. Will expanding exports make climate change that much worse?”
4. “Shell Betting Billions to Drill Oil Off the Icy Coast of Alaska.” Fortune
Jon Birger: “The payoff could be the largest U.S. offshore oil discovery in a generation.”
5. “Can We Survive The New Golden Age of Oil?” Foreign Policy
Steve Levine: “A flurry of new finds has analysts giddy over a new age of energy abundance. Just don’t ask about global warming.”
6. “America’s New Job Machine is Heating Up.” Fortune
Richard Martin: “Deep-sea drilling and fracking are helping unearth abundant supplies of oil and natural gas … just the elixir the U.S. economy needs.”
7. “The Future of Oil.” Time
Bryan Walsh: “Oil from the deep Atlantic to the Arctic, from fracking to the sands of Canada, is replacing dwindling supplies. But it comes at a heavy economic and environmental cost.”
OK, so we have all the energy we’ll need for long time, enough to last past 2200. We’ll even concede that point, we have too much. But supply is not the problem. The real problem is demand: Given today’s global population explosion, economic growth and global warming acceleration, your kids — in fact the whole human race — probably won’t be around long enough to enjoy this energy glut.
Stated another way: The world’s trapped in a subtle suicide pact. Too many people, demanding too much oil, dumping too much carbon in the air spells disaster. Ten billion by 2050 can destroy the planet.
Jeremy Grantham of the $100 billion GMO investment firm sees one disaster scenario unfolding: The planet’s resources simple cannot feed the 10 billion population predicted in 2050. So a 200-year supply of oil is irrelevant, except maybe for new species populating the planet a few eons in the future.
Fossil-fuels: Public Enemy No. 1 … wrecking the planet
McKibben was among more than a thousand activists jailed during the White House protest of the Keystone XL Pipeline last year. He says oil is a “rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy No. 1 to the survival of our planetary civilization,” a killer.
And quotes Naomi Klein, author of “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” for “the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model.”
And Wall Street knows why: Oil companies need to protect the $150 billion in profits they make annually. McKibben says even though “coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil … it’s already economically above ground … it’s figured into share prices … companies are borrowing money against it … nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony … it explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide … those reserves are their primary asset” giving “companies their value.”
Investors grasp today’s obsession with quarterly earnings, investors want steady growth in their stocks. McKibben cites data from John Fullerton, former J.P. Morgan managing director. He calculated the market value of today’s fossil-fuel reserves still in the ground: An estimated $27 trillion.
Those are the “five-times-too-much” reserves that will kill us if mined, drilled and refined, by releasing almost 3,000 gigatons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
NASA’s Space Studies leader warns, ‘Game over!’
So the battle lines are drawn: The oil industry has enough reserves for a couple centuries of earnings. But environmentalists are warning that using more than 20% of that “five times too much” fossil fuels reserves will destroy the planet. So 80% of the reserves must be kept underground, not drilled or mined or otherwise released into Earth’s air.
However, the oil industry will never agree to the environmentalists’ demands. Fullerton warns: that’d be like “writing off $20 trillion in assets.” Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has no intention of keeping “his reserves in the ground.” Just the opposite: His “company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.”
No wonder McKibben says “there’s not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson.”
The battle lines are clear. Recently James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in the New York Times: “Game Over for the Climate: Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.”
Today oil companies and environmentalists are on a collision course. Hansen frames the worst-case-scenario: The “concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty percent to 50% of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.”
Meanwhile, politicians are either climate deniers, or silent wimps.
Why nations fail? Because politicians fail to act … till too late
In his classic work, “Collapse: Why Societies Fail or Succeed,” anthropologist Jared Diamond makes it clear that over many thousands of years we’ve learned that societies collapse and disappear because their leaders fail to protect their natural resources and are unprepared when crises and disasters hit.
Survival demands new leaders with “the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.”
Unfortunately, the lessons of history warn us that civilizations all too often collapse because their leaders lack the necessary courage and vision. They only respond to crises, are unprepared, minimize risks, going beyond the point of no return. Then when caught off-guard, their worlds collapse, often fast, as they react with too little, too late. Game over.
www.marketwatch.com/story/big-oil-is-earths-public-enemy-no-1-2012-08-03?link=MW_popular
" ... overreacting alarmist? ... "
America soon enough will be overtaken as the most polluting country in the world by other countries such as India, China, Brazil plus minor contributions as manufacturing shifts from China to lower cost countries such as the Phillipines, Indonesia or wildcards in Southern Hemispheres of Africa or South America. The aggregiate total pollution from whatever goes into the air is compounded by volcanoes, animal and plant life including cattle, termites, etc. Accurate measurements have been disputed often.
Politicans sometimes are active or at other times more concerned with economic developement such as China and India wanting to achieve 1st World status. America and the EU essentially shipped some of the manufacturing to lower cost and politically willing to pollute countries.
Hating the big oil industry, the coal industry makes enthusiastic supporters politically active. The consequences often impacts the production of electricity such as Japan's shift from fear of nuke energy along with Germany's fear of nuke energy which the nuke energy industry argues adds to the dependence on polluting carbon based natural gas. Hating the oil industry shifts some of the impact to countries more willing to burn oil or refine oil and results in the oil products costing more such as burning ethanol in America based on US farmed specialty corn which is used only for ethanol and not food or feed.
"... The world’s trapped in a subtle suicide pact. Too many people, demanding too much oil, dumping too much carbon in the air spells disaster. Ten billion by 2050 can destroy the planet.
"... Jeremy Grantham of the $100 billion GMO investment firm sees one disaster scenario unfolding: The planet’s resources simple cannot feed the 10 billion population predicted in 2050. So a 200-year supply of oil is irrelevant, except maybe for new species populating the planet a few eons in the future.
======================================
Aug. 3, 2012
Big Oil is Earth’s Public Enemy No. 1
Commentary: 200-year supply but we’re all dead in 50
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — The world has “1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years,” brags Thomas Donohue, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO: “We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years, and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.”
Yes, 200 years of oil. Too bad it’ll kill us in 50 years. How? Easy, “we have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn,” says environmentalist Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone.
Reuters
The author of the 1989 classic “End of Nature” warns: “We’d have to keep 80% of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.”
Who’s right? Is McKibben an overreacting alarmist? Is Donohue too biased to trust? After all, the petroleum industry is the U.S. Chamber’s biggest source of money. Both are right. Yes, we have too much energy. Five times too much.
As a result, using more than one-fifth of it will dump so much excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that by 2050 fossil fuel companies will kill the planet. And that’s exactly what they plan to do.
The world’s behavior is now like a drug addict’s: The more we have, the more we demand, the more we love using it. Till we crash. McKibben has called this collective behavior a “suicide pact.”
Bad news: oil is the solution … to the wrong problem
First, let’s examine some independent sources, check the facts supporting the oil industry’s claims. New discoveries do tell us the Earth does have all we need for the foreseeable future … but to be fair, the same media sources also make clear that supply is not the problem … rather, demand and human behavior is the problem … and that has huge unintended consequences:
1. “Everything You Know About Peak Oil is Wrong” BusinessWeek
Charles Kenny: “We’re not running out of resources. Quite the contrary. … If we keep on using more we’ll surely run out of supplies one day. But … a long way off.”
2. “The Return of Fossil Fuels,” SmartMoney
Reshma Kapadia: “Enormous new oil and gas discoveries under American soil are having a game-changing impact on the entire economy.”
3. “King Coal’s Comeback.” Time
Bryan Walsh: “Asia needs coal, and the U.S. has plenty. Will expanding exports make climate change that much worse?”
4. “Shell Betting Billions to Drill Oil Off the Icy Coast of Alaska.” Fortune
Jon Birger: “The payoff could be the largest U.S. offshore oil discovery in a generation.”
5. “Can We Survive The New Golden Age of Oil?” Foreign Policy
Steve Levine: “A flurry of new finds has analysts giddy over a new age of energy abundance. Just don’t ask about global warming.”
6. “America’s New Job Machine is Heating Up.” Fortune
Richard Martin: “Deep-sea drilling and fracking are helping unearth abundant supplies of oil and natural gas … just the elixir the U.S. economy needs.”
7. “The Future of Oil.” Time
Bryan Walsh: “Oil from the deep Atlantic to the Arctic, from fracking to the sands of Canada, is replacing dwindling supplies. But it comes at a heavy economic and environmental cost.”
OK, so we have all the energy we’ll need for long time, enough to last past 2200. We’ll even concede that point, we have too much. But supply is not the problem. The real problem is demand: Given today’s global population explosion, economic growth and global warming acceleration, your kids — in fact the whole human race — probably won’t be around long enough to enjoy this energy glut.
Stated another way: The world’s trapped in a subtle suicide pact. Too many people, demanding too much oil, dumping too much carbon in the air spells disaster. Ten billion by 2050 can destroy the planet.
Jeremy Grantham of the $100 billion GMO investment firm sees one disaster scenario unfolding: The planet’s resources simple cannot feed the 10 billion population predicted in 2050. So a 200-year supply of oil is irrelevant, except maybe for new species populating the planet a few eons in the future.
Fossil-fuels: Public Enemy No. 1 … wrecking the planet
McKibben was among more than a thousand activists jailed during the White House protest of the Keystone XL Pipeline last year. He says oil is a “rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy No. 1 to the survival of our planetary civilization,” a killer.
And quotes Naomi Klein, author of “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” for “the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model.”
And Wall Street knows why: Oil companies need to protect the $150 billion in profits they make annually. McKibben says even though “coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil … it’s already economically above ground … it’s figured into share prices … companies are borrowing money against it … nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony … it explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide … those reserves are their primary asset” giving “companies their value.”
Investors grasp today’s obsession with quarterly earnings, investors want steady growth in their stocks. McKibben cites data from John Fullerton, former J.P. Morgan managing director. He calculated the market value of today’s fossil-fuel reserves still in the ground: An estimated $27 trillion.
Those are the “five-times-too-much” reserves that will kill us if mined, drilled and refined, by releasing almost 3,000 gigatons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
NASA’s Space Studies leader warns, ‘Game over!’
So the battle lines are drawn: The oil industry has enough reserves for a couple centuries of earnings. But environmentalists are warning that using more than 20% of that “five times too much” fossil fuels reserves will destroy the planet. So 80% of the reserves must be kept underground, not drilled or mined or otherwise released into Earth’s air.
However, the oil industry will never agree to the environmentalists’ demands. Fullerton warns: that’d be like “writing off $20 trillion in assets.” Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has no intention of keeping “his reserves in the ground.” Just the opposite: His “company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas.”
No wonder McKibben says “there’s not a more reckless man on the planet than Tillerson.”
The battle lines are clear. Recently James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in the New York Times: “Game Over for the Climate: Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.”
Today oil companies and environmentalists are on a collision course. Hansen frames the worst-case-scenario: The “concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty percent to 50% of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.”
Meanwhile, politicians are either climate deniers, or silent wimps.
Why nations fail? Because politicians fail to act … till too late
In his classic work, “Collapse: Why Societies Fail or Succeed,” anthropologist Jared Diamond makes it clear that over many thousands of years we’ve learned that societies collapse and disappear because their leaders fail to protect their natural resources and are unprepared when crises and disasters hit.
Survival demands new leaders with “the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.”
Unfortunately, the lessons of history warn us that civilizations all too often collapse because their leaders lack the necessary courage and vision. They only respond to crises, are unprepared, minimize risks, going beyond the point of no return. Then when caught off-guard, their worlds collapse, often fast, as they react with too little, too late. Game over.
www.marketwatch.com/story/big-oil-is-earths-public-enemy-no-1-2012-08-03?link=MW_popular