Fossil Fuel Subsidies
2021 November 12 21:12 stuartscott 1431¤ 3020¤
How can we expect to make any progress fighting climate change if fossil fuels continue being made artificially cheap?
In the USA roughly $20 billion of tax subsidies is paid each year to the fossil fuel industry; 20% to coal and 80% to natural gas and crude oil [1]. Worldwide that figure is closer to $423 billion [2].
I had hoped COP26 would be a turning point but instead the latest draft of the agreement mentions fossil fuel subsidies once;
IV. Mitigation
- Calls upon Parties to accelerate the development, deployment and dissemination of technologies, and the adoption of policies, to transition towards low-emission energy systems, including by rapidly scaling up clean power generation and accelerating the phaseout of unabated coal power and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels;
Which, as BBC News pointed out [3], is a watered down version of the previous text;
...accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.
So what would happen if all the subsidies currently going to the fossil fuel industry were redirected into the renewable energy industry?
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2021 November 12 22:01 poulter7 415¤ 1022¤
An initial thought of the effect... Some portion of companies who provide the raw materials for 80% of the US's energy consumption would go out of business, energy inflation would spike hurting poorest families most, a large number of blue collar workers would be out of work, creating mass unemployment, tech/green company stocks would bubble and wealth inequality would likely take a huge jump for the worse too.
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2021 November 12 22:26 stuartscott 1282¤ 763¤
Good points!
I'd imagine many of the companies providing raw materials could pivot to provide for renewable energy consumption - eg. solar panels, wind turbines, and other hardware need to be built, installed, and maintained.
Similarly, subsidies would fuel the renewable energy industries growth; lowering prices and creating blue collar jobs.
I'm also not sure the wealth inequality would be worse than the current concentration in the fossil fuel industry - for one, individuals like @winksaville are able to earn from their own renewable energy installations so there is a democratizing effect.
The two major issues I can see are; 1) the impact on the poorest families, as you pointed out. They may not have the means to invest in a new electric car, or solar panels, etc. Though this could be alleviated with temporary subsidies or low interest loans available only to people below a certain income. 2) the battery technology is nowhere near where it needs to be; the energy density is much lower than petroleum, and the chemicals used, such as lithium, are highly dangerous and mining them have significant environmental impacts - though to be fair petrol is also very dangerous and oil wells are far from safe and green.
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2021 November 12 22:38 poulter7 863¤ 666¤
Drillers & refiners etc. aren't going to magically be able to switch to start digging up high quality silicon and rare earth metals. Location of these resources is going to be the biggest problem, so they will necessarily decimate communities. Maintenance companies switching, sure, I buy that.
I don't know the ratio of labor needed in green fuels versus that in dirty fuels to know if you'd be anywhere near replacing the jobs you'll lose, but regardless this radical switch people are calling for assuming people are fungible, but based on location and skills this largely isn't actually that true. I suspect there would be a net loss in blue-collar jobs over the long-term, and I'm sure someone would rather have a job than have a small rebate on power prices they generate from selling power back to the grid (if they can afford the solar cell setup etc.)
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2021 November 12 22:51 stuartscott 562¤ 771¤
True, the same equipment, laborers, and locations cannot be used to mine the materials for renewables. Someone will have to build new equipment, train new laborers, handle logistics, and negotiate real estate - sounds like a lot of new jobs to me!
I also grant you that some communities will be decimated, either by old business moving away, or by new business disrupting, but let's be clear - if we carry on the way we're going all communities will be decimated.
Humanity will cease to exist.
I'm sure someone would rather have a future than a job.
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2021 November 13 02:31 poulter7 454¤ 1089¤
That would be slightly more reasonable for Americans if the US had sizable rare earth metals and high quality silicon. However, to my understanding it doesn't.
You write your entire second paragraph as an indisputable and commonly agreed fact. I simply don't buy the premise that we need a radical shift to renewable fuels. Further, I see it as completely rational for a voting base to be worry about their livelihoods and not care about the climate.
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2021 November 15 19:55 stuartscott 1134¤ 546¤
That would be slightly more reasonable for Americans if the US had sizable rare earth metals and high quality silicon.
There are thousands of US-operated mines offshore and abroad, so I don't see why it is unreasonable.
It is not unprecedented for US projects to be located in other countries - the United States Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) were created specifically to support this. Over the past 15 years, EXIM has lent or issued billions in grants to fossil fuel projects, and OPIC committed more than $6 billion in financing to renewable energy projects between 2010 & 2015 [1].
Furthermore, mining operations need not be in the US for jobs to be created in the US, there are many auxiliary and support roles that are performed remotely.
You write your entire second paragraph as an indisputable and commonly agreed fact.
Climate Change is an Existential Threat - are there any credible sources that dispute or disagree with that fact?
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2021 November 15 20:54 poulter7 303¤ 789¤
I’ll take a look at the rest of this post in detail, but I think it might be helpful to ensure we’re talking on the same terms. Could you define “existential threat”, are you referring (as your prior post suggested) 100% distraction of the species? I’d probably ask for a source on that first.
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2021 November 17 17:05 stuartscott 1471¤
You may consider my position alarmist, and perhaps I am, and perhaps not all of humanity will be destroyed.
I wonder what percentage of the population would a study need to predict will die before you consider "radical shift to renewable fuels" necessary? 1%? 10%? 50%?
Can we agree that the amount of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide and methane) in Earth's atmosphere has increased, and continues to increase, as a result of human activity?
Given this, consider;
- Greenhouse gases in the air trap heat which would normally vent out into space, causing global temperature rises and resulting in;
- less habitable and arable land either due to excessive heat or rising sea levels, leading to shortages of food and housing.
- an increase in extreme weather such as droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires, again leading to food shortages.
- thawing permafrost which releases methane into the atmosphere and accelerates climate change.
- Excessive carbon dioxide in water causes Ocean Acidification which is good for Seagrasses and Algae, but bad for pretty much all other marine life, resulting in shortages of seafood.
Even if climate change doesn't kill everyone, it puts us in a very precarious position. When presented with scarcity, humanity has historically responded with war.
Why would someone, knowing the above, choose to continue supporting fossil fuel subsidies? - should the livelihoods of the few outweigh the lives of the many?
- Greenhouse gases in the air trap heat which would normally vent out into space, causing global temperature rises and resulting in;
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2021 November 13 02:33 poulter7 139¤ 358¤
To clarify, rather than risk being misconstrued, I'm all for shutting down some coal plants to make way for small modular nuclear reactors.
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2021 November 15 19:57 stuartscott 716¤
According to the EPA 25% of greenhouse emissions come from electricity production, of which approximately 62% comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas.
So even if half the fossil fuel plants were shutdown and replaced with nuclear reactors the percentage decrease in emissions wouldn't reach double figures - it just doesn't move the needle far enough.
We need bolder, more ambitious action to tackle emissions in all of the five largest sectors (Transporation, Electricity, Industry, Commercial & Residential, and Agriculture) just to buy us enough time so we can tackle the greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere.
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2021 November 16 18:05 kaxline 3282¤ 966¤
I'll start a new thread here but try to synthesize some of the points that were brought up elsewhere.
First I think there's some merit to the idea that a full-blown and immediate switch over to renewables would end up harming the most vulnerable people on the planet and likely collapse/wreck/etc some economies. It may mean that nuclear reactors have to be part of the solution.
My biggest problem with this argument is I hear it coming mostly from the vested interests who knowingly and willingly created the problem, and the reason we can't do a gradual shift is precisely because these companies/orgs/interest groups ran an active public misinformation campaign for decades which largely created the urgency of now.
So while it forces pragmatists to now work on more gradual terms that benefit those companies in order to make safe progress, I don't think the new generation of people within the fossil fuels industry appreciates how frustrating it is to be told to "look forward, not backward," by people who have aligned themselves with legacy bad actors (assuming attitudes have indeed changed with younger fossil fuels people).
As for the terms of "existential threat" I think arguing over semantics is a dodge. Humans and humanity will of course survive to some extent through whatever, but to the degree that something like climate science and modeling can tell us anything about the future, the overwhelming consensus is that life will be unpleasant for many areas on the planet given certain temperature changes. The causal studies and evidence we have points us in a clear direction of action.
If you're taking dispute with scientific consensus, you're saying that you and your minority opinion know better. And if that's the case, why trust science at all on anything? Why have a scientific method to uncover results that you will say are not accurate if you don't agree? This is a larger problem and a distracting argument that most serious, good faith people are not interested in having while the world burns.
I'm ambivalent to whether subsidies go to the fossil fuel industry because people like us can't do anything to stop it. Support for mitigating global warming is overwhelming and still this language gets watered down. We need a runaway process for curtailing emissions and capturing carbon that can undo the runaway process of energy consumption that got us here. The battle over subsidies is downstream from fixing more root political and economic causes.
The only project I've found that has come close to being a scalable solution is Klima DAO:
https://www.klimadao.finance/
They are a crypto token that rewards people for putting their money in the on-chain treasury. That treasury is backed by carbon tonnes. They've already sucked up almost 10m carbon tonnes after only two months of activity. Out of what I believe is a market of 400m total volume. The idea is to create scarcity in the carbon market to drive up price. As price goes up, so do the incentives for curbing emissions and setting up carbon capture at scale.
We need these types of market solutions that align everyone's incentives in order to coordinate our way out of this. I don't know if Klima is enough to be the entire solution, but if not we need more projects like it.
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2021 November 17 04:16 poulter7 1713¤ 218¤
Personally, I don't disagree with the scientific consensus, I tend to agree. In this instant I just disagreed with Stuart's assertion “Humanity will cease to exist”. I think a good faith discussion requires avoiding hyperbole alongside not avoiding facts.
I expect attitudes on the whole have changed to fossil fuels, and that's probably good. I'd like to live in a cleaner environment, with better air quality and less extreme weather swings as the climate gets more volatile with a build up of carbon.
But I understand why someone would vote/lobby/unionize for their own self interest and ask why they are making more of a sacrifice by the virtue of being American (I'm in the US right now), than the average individual in a country with less ambitious decarbonisation plans. My observation is that such macro decisions are the luxury and purview of the rich or powerful of a country and likely they do not suffer directly from the action.
According to the cftc net zero is around 52,400m tonnes of greenhouse gasses per year, ~80% of which is carbon [1]. I would definitely agree that a market solution is likely to have a significant impact. This is indeed the idea of cap and trade programs, EUAs, RECs, and RINs (which are a pure genius invention in my view).
I'm not sure you need Defi here, but sure. My concern with that would be that ultimately you're at the whim of a government and wavering policy from administration to administration as "carbon scarcity" isn't really a thing if it's a government imposed limit. A government in a deep recession would (and likely should) ease caps devaluing any retired offsets.
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/media/6001/EEMAC060321_ChristianSchneider/download
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2021 November 17 12:45 kaxline 219¤
Yeah, I don't like the idea of anyone sharing more of the burden without being compensated by the rest of the world who will benefit. We need to find some win-win scenarios.
What is the solution you're most bullish on?
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2021 November 15 22:48 stuartscott 359¤
COP26 concluded on Saturday the 13th of November 2021 with an agreement between the 197 participating countries to cut CO2 emissions, increase funding to developing countries to help cope with climate change and adopt clean energy, phase-down coal, and phase-out fossil fuel subsidies, known as the Glasgow Climate Pact.
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