These companies couldn’t even transition to the coal business. Shoot, the majors have struggled mightily in trying to transition to the shale business. That’s dominated by the independents. They are in the oil and gas business. They make good money in that. There is absolutely nothing similar about exploring for and producing oil and gas and solar panels or hydroelectric or whatever else you think they should be in. Focused companies are the best performing.
Well, for example, I think my expertise helps quite a bit in responses about people not understanding marketing contracts or commodity pricing.
Is it really so hard to say that an action by BO is good? Do you expect every company to take out a full page ad? I understand that BO may be attempting to pull strings behind the scenes. Even so, any public support, however tepid, helps in the public perception of AGW. Certainly it would help if BO would obstruct even less but I’ll at least take the good where I can get it.
I’d like to hear a response from some of the more notorious AGW skeptics on why BO is publicly admitting to AGW. If the companies with the most to lose are on board whence is the skepticism?
Actually you ignored that I said early that this only shows a tacit support of the companies for the ones in the industry that are funding denial.
And this shows also your lack of logic, the point is that I’m not contradicting what they said, I’m saying here that those companies are being incompetent by having rogue CEOs and Members that are undermining their official position.
That, or that they are just lying to all regarding what are their real intensions are.
Nor did I say they did. I said that this massive difference makes the oil industry and tobacco industry not at all analogous in their responses to public concerns.
Somehow I think the buggy whip manufacturers in heaven are smiling at that simple idea.
Well I do think that someone like Nordhaus, that was just appointed President of the American Economic Association to have a better idea on what we should be doing.
BTW the same interview was pointed out several times in past discussions.
I think I would laugh at someone who criticized buggy whip manufacturers for not diversifying into whaling for oil. Perhaps it actually does take some specific skills to be successful at an enterprise. If I were in the solar power industry, I would probably take it as a criticism that someone thought it was so easy to get into it that a company life Anadarko, for example, could just step right and and compete.
Interesting stuff. Was that meant to refute something I said? I’m pretty sure it didn’t. If anything it augmented my earlier comments about carbon taxes.
OK. So you do not know how analogy and comparison work. Fair enough. Since no one has called for the oil companies to shut down and stop producing oil, your point is nonsense. There was a specific analogy posted and finding nitpicky nonsense to complain about it that avoids the actual analogy does not make your point.
Apache? So what? What “concrete proposals” came from ExxonMobil, (that tried to bury the issue with vague allusions to other issues)? Where are the “concrete proposals” from any of the truly large outfits? More to the point, you actually committed the fallacy of equivocation in the first two sentences of your own OP, and your whole “debate” is based on that error. You noted that people have lodged the accusation that “Big Oil secretly funds all the Climate Change denialism,” then avoid a direct response to that accusation by saying well they don’t deny it on their website. So what? The point of everyone who has criticized the OP is that regardless of any feel-good lines that appear on a website, Big Oil is, indeed, funding climate change denialists–a point that you have refused to address with a single fact.
You are fixated on the wrong points–as you have been throughout this thread. The issue is not that you only posted the one-liners. The point is that you have not provided two specific things for which you have been asked: where is the refutation of any specific post claiming that Big Oil is funding the denialists? where is any evidence that they support genuine science into the issue?
Do what I asked. Several posts in this thread have pointed to Big Oil involvement with the denialists. Find the evidence that sows those citations to be in error. You brought up the topic. If you were not prepared to discuss it, you should have left it alone. (Refraing from the bait-and-switch argument you first offered would also have been a good idea.)
You are doing it again–same bad logic. You did, indeed replace one point of discussion with a different answer. No one, (certainly no one that you have actually made the effort to quote), has claimed that Big Oil has “denied” Climate Change. You, yourself, have noted that the accusation is that Big Oil funds efforts to deny Climate Change–a charge that you resolutely refuse to address.
No, that is missing the point, as **Farin ** inferred only by realizing that they are into the energy business is that they can evade the fate of those makers.
I’m only saying, it is like I remarked on how mistaken idea that posters involved in the issue were not aware of what the Oil companies are saying officially. Your idea that proponents of change are not aware of what you claimed about not stopping using oil this instant is also **not **what I or others claimed.
Since there is evidence of companies like Exxon funding denialist sources in the past, it is clear that the answer was yes.
Nowadays the funding is indirect, and the point I made is still there: what companies claim now is just hooey if they are not discouraging their members in the open to stop funding deniers and politicians that do the same.
There are a couple of very basic bottom-line conclusions one can make here, and neither of them should be controversial.
The first and most fundamental is the vast and, on the face of it, rather inexplicable gulf between what the science is telling us about climate change and what a big portion of the general public believes – and what many of them believe fervently, absolutely, and with visceral emotion, often based on really major misconceptions. So much so that, as already said, any Republican politician who aligns himself with the science does so at his great peril, and even most Democrats prefer not to talk about it much. This absurd situation is a fact – not something you can dance around – and the question is, how did it come about?
A quick survey of Internet sites shows that rancorous websites denying AGW abound and greatly outnumber the relatively small number of sites that discuss legitimate science, so this public ignorance and misperception of facts can be thus explained, but what is its origin? Who has the greatest vested interest in climate change denial, the most money to engage in it, and a clear track record of having done so over many years? The oil companies. They are by no means the only culprits – there’s the coal companies and much of heavy industry, and their wealthy owners personally, like the infamous Koch brothers. But the oil companies bear a huge brunt of the responsibility. There seems little point in reposting the links to the denialism funding studies that I posted before. (ETA: IIRC the UCC study I linked attributes about ten times your stated $3 million to Exxon denialism funding – more like $29 million or so.)
The second conclusion I will make is about your OP and the entire thread you started. It’s not appropriate to second-guess your motives and I have no basis for doing so, but the “not a strawman” argument has now developed into the assertion that you simply said that oil companies were acknowledging AGW on their websites, and didn’t intend to say or imply any more than that. Fair enough. What I conclude is that, whether you meant to do it or not, those links are misleading. That is the real point. No one cares what they “say” on their websites, what is important is what historically these companies have done, and what they continue to do. Exxon to this day for example continues to provide financial support to the Heritage Foundation, one of the most activist and notorious sources of lies about climate change (or to be more accurate, their contributions are traceable up to at least 2012). Coal-mining industrialists like Robert Murray are trying to sue the EPA while publicly lying about the reasons and about the facts of climate change. The Koch brothers are providing vast amounts of funding to climate change denial while egregiously violating environmental laws.
The oil companies have historically been absolutely in lock-step with these sordid activities and you may choose to believe that all of them have suddenly and mysteriously reformed, but I don’t. Their public statements are the absolute minimum they can say about climate change without drawing the kind of public ridicule and chastisement from scientists and responsible politicians that Exxon, for one, has already attracted many times. So the implication that these companies are voluntarily presenting an accurate view of science, and doing so because they’re such good upstanding citizens, is utterly without merit. If they were, they’d be trying to reverse the absurd public misconceptions I described above instead of continuing to inflame them, and, as a few companies are starting to do, they’d be diversifying into energy sources that actually have a future. Until they do that, their pious wishy-washy website platitudes are worthless.
Natch. But the *scale *of the necessity is lower, even per capita. As is the waste.
But that aside, I also disagree with your seminal point re: the incomparable nature of Big Oil and Big Tobacco when it comes to their lobbying efforts and their PR. What does the absence of necessity for tobacco have to do with anything ?
I said it before but the irony bears repeating: Leaffan lives in Ontario, in which about 85% of the electric power comes from clean nuclear and hydro, with a further relatively small percentage coming from some of the largest established wind farms in Canada. I love irony.
ETA: Ontario was also the site of a huge coal plant demolition, the Lakeview coal generating station, which was demolished and properly reduced to rubble in 2007.
Because, for both your point and understanding as “nonsense,” is because you are looking at it from one, single fixed angle.
Ignore investors. They don’t matter here. There are shareholders to a single corporation, but ignore them, too, and follow this business process. Company A makes widgets. Widgets are a hot craze and make huge amounts of money. They have become a true company. Now that they are giving returns of a certain magnitude, they have a market cap that they can tap into. Using this market cap Company A internally expands. New production facilities/capabilities, new people, new corporate (e.g. non-production) staff.
Five years go by. Widgets are at market saturation. The shareholders don’t go “Oh, your wildly profitable days are over? Well, that’s fine. We’ll just park our money in your company for the rest of time.” They want as good or better returns, usually in as short a time frame as possible or they flee. (Of course, there are times when shareholders will give leeway to a previously top performer and allow a year or two to get back on the ball, but this varies based on so many factors it’s not a sure thing to any company at any point in time.) So, when the Widgets start declining in market value there are two things a company can do: Buy a company with the market cap leverage it currently has available to increase (ideally forever, realistically in the short term) it’s return and make shareholders happy with their return.
At the beginning, the purchases will make sense to the core business. Maybe they buy a company that produces a prerequisite for the widget that also sells to other companies. As time goes on, the purchases get further away from the original core. This is starting a conglomerate and it’s what most extant companies do to stay alive. But, there is the downside, like you alluded to: Stocks are no longer rock stars. They don’t shoot up and have huge returns. For this, the performance-oriented fund managers stop using them. But, they still exist.
Conglomerates in various stages are here and all around you.
Companies are not run by investors. They are run by boards that are “Sensitive” to investor demands. Some companies are given carte blanche while other companies are riddled with activist investors/investor groups. Most are somewhere in the middle: An activist investor group or two with a lot of silent investors.
Forgive my shorthand. Retail = End-of-line customer for this situation. I believe I made that clarification before. If the sale to another company ends with that company, they become the “Retail” customer in this case.
Why, yes, the specific structure of a tax will alter how the tax is applied.
Why, yes. The US will only be taxing US-production (if they go with a production tax).
Commodities on exchanges take into account the cost of production as part of their price structure. If the cost of production goes up, the pricing goes up to compensate. Now, assuming a perfect market, this pricing may reduce back to pre-tax rates and impact final profit. But that’s a decision the market makes. Also, note, that by driving up the production cost of American oil, we could simply not be purchased from if the production tax is setup like a minimum price per barrel. I
But the demand fall off is: A) Fairly small for oil products; B) Would have to be huge to convert people to completely different power sources; C) Even at $4.50+/gallon as the US hit (which is, depending on where you are, a 75c - $1.25 tax per gallon), people didn’t massively convert to another power source; D) hurts the poor significantly worse than any other players.
Now for my point: In any situation, any cost increases are going to be played as “Oh, this is because of the new tax by the government. Sorry, guys.” So if the pump price goes up to $4.50 a gallon (as a for instance) there will be incredible pressure on the government to drop that new tax. It won’t be blamed on the oil companies as the last round of fuel price hikes were. Also, while this is complex in any scheme, any taxes will be shifted to the final consumer as additional cost which will not be borne by the mining/production/refining segments of the oil chain.
Yes. But I believe the lowest EROI for shale is in the 2-range. I’m not sure which those fields are (and also looks at only oil crude from shale, not the other products you get from fracking, which are moving towards an integrated well setup).
Yes, the small(relatively) niche oil companies did fare worse than the vertically ingegrated ones. But the ones that survived produced a profit, despite earnings slumps.
And why do you think this is good?
Why do sellers not control their contract pricing, even if it’s anchored to an index? It would be simple to insert language to increase the price, even if some of their contracts don’t do that. Additionally, the spot price market would certainly take this index up over time somewhat as the taxes increase the production costs (assuming, again, it’s a production tax of some kind).
You are correct, according to Platts. I was confusing or conflating term contracts, in terms of duration and volume, with the actual costing methodology used.
Actually, because of fracking, this is already happening. Because of the low cost and relatively easy collection of gas from fracked natural gas wells, the energy sector has been converting for 3-8 years from coal plants over to natural gas generators. And, with a much cleaner burn than coal and an additional 2,203 tcf of technically recoverable gas, those generators will run for a long time.
Taxes, at least at this point, don’t seem warranted. Perhaps subsidizing the installation of natural gas plants would make it faster without hurting those at the bottom of our society?
Why? Granted, there’d have to be a phase in for a proper scrubbing technology to be adopted (mainly because the technology is in it’s infancy), but the initial setups would be continually improved so that they would increase in effectiveness over time. Additionally, companies would be driven to reducing the cost of the scrubbing they’d have to do to have a lower cost.
In terms of enforcement, well, if it were done right it wouldn’t be that difficult or expensive - weight the output of the scrubbing/sequestration technology minus whatever substance it’s stored in or stick some CO2 monitors around the reclamation system to monitor local CO2 concentration. Granted, enforcement by the US Government is never useful. I’m sure some company would get off for 20 years by sticking lead in the middle of their scrubbing technology and using that to weight down the output, or similar.
Here’s where i diverge on the tax angle: The US Government, in particular, has never been very trust worthy with managing it’s cash flows. Take any program in our history and you’ll see a huge long-term trend to “borrow” from those funds for any little thing that comes up. It’s one thing to borrow for an emergency or disaster, it’s another to spend $200 million of highway trust fund on various museums tangentially related to the automobile.
In terms of the cost on society, it makes much more sense for those costs of mitigation to be performed by the producers of the fuel and born by the ultimate consumers of that fuel than to add a tax to try and drive behavior. The tax will be changed so many times that it’ll disconnect it’s actual purpose from what it’s doing. And, as soon as it’s overly burdensome, there will be intense pressure to repeal it. While all of that is going on, it’ll utterly screw anyone at the bottom of society.
Additionally, this “cost of carbon” won’t actually be dealt with. The taxes will start now and in 50 years when they have to actually move to mitigate an issue, do you think they’ll have 49 years of back-taxes to mitigate that issue with? Oh, heck no they won’t. That 49 years of taxes will have been spent just about everywhere else.
Let me put it this way: You grow and refine opium. You do what you can to keep the fertilizer away from the water table. But you don’t also get to say “Oh, well, we think that people should stop using opium products. It’s way bad, man.” If they say that, I think that it would be be fine to call them a hypocrite.
As for consumers, I do agree with one of your points (Somewhere in this thread) that there aren’t any useful or awesome alternatives, and the best bet for a useful alternative (nuclear) is currently in a bureaucratic nightmare of red tape in the US. But I also support going full nuclear powered, with batteries in every car. In the meantime, I support the current movement over to natural gas. Better and cheaper.
You’ll note that Exxon’s statement is specifically tailored to stop them from having to do anything on their production side of the fence. And I outlined policies that they could do for the other part of their statement.
Biofuels are only a stop-gap solution, but their advantage is that they re-introduce into the atmosphere CO2 that was sequestered by present-day organics – that is, CO2 that is part of the active carbon cycle. Burning coal and oil re-introduces into the atmosphere CO2 that was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago, when the earth was, for all intents and purposes, an alien climate to which nothing in the present is adapted.
Oil products involve digging into the earth for “new” stuff to burn, releasing into the atmosphere carbon that had been fixed in a semi-solid state since the dinosaurs. Bio-diesel releases plant-fixed carbon which the plants fixed over the course of their (relatively short) lifetime. It’s more of a zero-sum game in that regards : the plant vacuums CO2 from the atmosphere to grow, then you burn it and release it back. Net carbon increase : null.
That’s the simplified, high-school biology theory anyway - I believe in practice it’s more complex than that and biodiesel does have some negative impact. Ain’t no such thing as a free, hot lunch.
You know, on one hand you have these short statements by parent companies. And on the other, you have this, where a demonstrably bullshit denialist paper was bought and paid for by the oil industry. I’m not entirely sure if they’re putting their money where their mouth is on this one.
