I don’t want us to get off oil immediately. This is the fatal flaw with too many people in the environmental left. They want us to live in the gutter, walk/ride bikes for miles on end instead of use cars to get from A to B, or worse, take public transportation in LOS ANGELES !!!
And they want that asap. I don’t. I want us to work more heavily on making the cleaner forms of transportation like electric cars cheaper faster. If anyone wants us off oil and they have means, they need to put their own money up and buy a tesla or leaf or other electric cars. Done already? Then if they have enough, they should buy some of their friends and staff electric cars too. THEY can help speed this along. Their bitching about carbon won’t do it.
The same goes for solar, it’s getting much cheaper and in some places like Hawaii it makes more sense to do that than buy it from a utility. People need to focus on accelerating and developing technologies so that the cleaner options become CHEAPER for everyone.
So all the talk from environmentalists supporting (some of them putting money where their mouths are) electric cars was a figment of our imagination?
Actually after years of discussions it is clear that the ones that make propaganda against any changes have convinced you that many environmentalists want everyone to go cold turkey, not true and many plans only talk about incremental changes.
The flaw in this silly tirade is that then it does mean that the ones who did so already should have more power to ask you to change too.
I don’t think it is much logical since the biggest effect will be done once regulations and taxes for emissions are in place to control the biggest polluters, that include power plants. We should not forget that the ones that prevent that from taking place are the politicians from the right in this country put in power with a lot of help from the fossil fuel industry.
I agree, but this also seems that is missing that the biggest enemy for this is the right that is following the dictates of fossil funded groups that tells local government to prevent that from happening.
We already hit 400 PPM in the content of CO2 in the atmosphere, at that level we already increased the probability that we will raise the temperature by 2 degrees a lot. Not working to seriously limit the increase will make that 2 degree increase likelihood in to a more certain thing. Not controlling this now means also that then we face the chances of even worse increases in CO2 concentrations and then more increases in temperature over 2 degrees Celsius and that means that much more hardships are going to come.
And that is a related item that allows us to get back to the subject at hand. There are studies pointing that the unrest in Syria was caused in big part by the increase in temperature observed already.
Shorter and in comic format:
So, besides the Iraq invasion making a mess that also made ISIS possible, the climate is changing with a lot of our help and that helped DAESH to set shop too. There were then many items that could had prevented ISIS/DAECH from even becoming a force.
However, regarding the OP, I have to say that changing to alternative energy may be an ultimate weapon against the money people in the middle east that funds groups like ISIS; but since an instant change to alternatives is not in the cards I do not see how that will be effective against terrorists, I have seen that the oil operations that are controlled by DAESH have been targets already and the terrorists have worked hard to make enemies of almost the whole world, so IMHO the so called Caliphate will be a memory way before we are making changes to our sources of energy.
Don’t agree. They’d run out of steam. The whole benefit of oil is it takes the strain off a society. EROI. They’d be so busy trying to get everyone on meth they’d have no time and energy for fighting for Qatar. …I mean establishing the caliphate.
We are not screwed. The worst that will happen with a delayed shift to cleaner technologies is a bit more adaptation needed.
Human beings in our current form have persisted on this earth for tens of thousands of years. Survived ice ages, lack of antibiotics, deserts, forests, island locales, frozen hinterlands. This was before modern civilization when one of the more advanced techniques to keep from freezing was burning wood (far more carbon intensive per unit of heat btw compared to using natural gas for the same heating). We’ve also shifted from hunter gatherer to farmers to something beyond with the green revolution and not gmo crops (a GOOD thing). Human civilization is orders of magnitude more resilient than it ever has been. I am not worried about the future, I do not think we are f*cked because we are still in better shape today and in the foreseeable decades than we were even a few hundred years ago, before man made climate change.
People like to focus only on the detritus of mankind, but never the advancements and perks.
They like to pretend that the human species is inflexible as their own imaginations, but we don’t need to be such pessimistic nihilists about the future. We will almost certainly be better off than worse off in another 50 years, even if we are slower at removing carbon than many environmentalists want.
And the point about the people with means putting money where there mouth is, poor people on the margins can’t afford electric cars, or the limitations right now en masse. We need to have a laser focus on getting these technologies cheaper, and once we have that, THEN we can and should get more aggressive about phasing out older technologies (i.e. a tax on gasoline cars).
But if you did that now, everyone would pay more money to get a car, including poorer people who can least afford it. It’s astonishingly regressive. And the point is it is needlessly so. Hold off on the wet dreams of the enviro left until we have equivalent alternatives that are at price parity, THEN put the screws on the dirtier stuff more heavily.
CTRL-F search for Qatar yields nothing in that article. But it’s a military website, and therefore not free to print what it wants. If the captain says shut up about Qatar, they shut up about Qatar. Other bits of the government aren’t so shy
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[/SIZE]And maybe we can get a second opinion on oil smuggling ?
Terrorism Center says ISIS got 100 million in all 2014 from oil.
Burying the lede, huh? Glossed right over the $20-50 billion in stolen military equipment, $500-800 million in stolen cash, and $100-300 million in kickbacks and no-show jobs.
If I’m adding things up correctly, even your highest estimate of oil revenues constitutes 5% of its haul last year.
All that only to miss the point, No, I’m not saying that we should drop civilization as we know it, in fact most of the serious proponents of change are not saying that. In fact we are going ‘to science the shit about it’.
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Some people say transitioning to clean energy will simply cost too much - "leave it to future generations." In Edinburgh, Scotland, Richard Alley explains that if we start soon the cost of the transformation could be similar to that which was paid for something none of us would want to do without - clean water and the modern sanitation system.
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I suspect that a lot of the propaganda from the right that denies even that the changes can be beneficial has gotten to you.
BTW Richard alley is not a lefty environmentalist, he is still a Republican.
Good thing I never proposed that, many times what the experts and I proposed was that big changes are kept at economical levels that all can afford it by involving government and industry. Talk about just waiting to see that the price of toilets was affordable to all and then making the big change was a non starter or did not lead to change until the sewers and water supply was organized and build.
BTW you did skip how the issue affected Syria, just trying to keep this in focus.
Mr. Q– Why don’t you come up with your own cites for how much oil revenue constitutes of their overall assets. Plus, let’s not confuse “revenue” with “profits.”
I’m eagerly awaiting your cites on how much other, non-oil revenue they have in order for you to prove your case.
Mr Raven, I did. And your own source was for revenues. If you thought it wasn’t then you have located a possible source of confusion.
Go find a set of comprehensive income sources first, one that’s agreed on between your government departments, preferably cross referenced with other govs and orgs. Not for me, for yourself, because you need to have a proper picture of your world. It’s got to include all those things the CTC has, plus assets held over from previous state/private sponsorship as well as current streams, hand-overs from other jihad groups, oil, and anything else.
I agree that a lot of the revenue is not coming just from oil, but I have to mention that I did not imagine that the forces against ISIS have targeted oil tankers or processing units precisely to prevent the oil revenue from benefiting ISIS.
Point here is that if it was not important revenue then the installations would not had been targets otherwise. I do agree though on finding sources for the amount of revenue that ISIS is getting from oil.
They get money from a number of sources besides oil. They are funded from donors, they get money from looting and selling antiquities in the areas they have taken over, they get money from smuggling and taxes, kidnapping and human trafficking (the sex slavery trade), and from selling captured military weapons and hardware. Granted, cutting off the oil trade would hurt them, but then we are currently interdicting their oil blackmarkets via air strikes and it hasn’t brought them to their knees (nor has the fact that there is a huge oil glut on the world market currently and the prices are pretty low). Since there isn’t any realistic way that we are going to do what the OP is suggesting and wholesale switch from an oil based system to one of electric cars and solar/wind it’s a moot point…unless we can completely interdict their black market sales via military means, which hasn’t happened yet, they will always get some revenue from this source. And if they couldn’t they would simply ramp up other means to get revenue as they have in the past.
They’ve lost an enormous amount of tankers. Something like 500 recently between Russian and NATO strikes. Only so many trucks in the world, I would think burny things like oil won’t last long when attacked by explody things like bombs.
I agree with this mostly, the nit is in the part about “it hasn’t brought them to their knees” AFAIK, the latest news in the field for DAESH is bad, with Kurdish and Iraqi forces expelling them from cities. IIUC DAESH is relying on younger and younger recruits, and it seems to me that no amount of money can make an effective fighting force when they are being decimated.
