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[...] according to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.
[...] The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on "natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.
Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: "Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions."
(Score: -1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 28 2019, @12:52AM (36 children)
That's all fine and good but when your lot make absurd, chicken little predictions like this it kind of flushes any credibility you might have had right down the shitter.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 28 2019, @01:16AM (35 children)
So go live alone in the woods and eat berries and grubs and let the adults in the room get on with adulting. We get it: you don't know, you don't care, you don't know enough to care, and you don't care enough to know, a perfect black hole of solipsism. Fine, but you've removed yourself from the discourse; go sit in the corner and whack off while the grownups speak seriously.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 28 2019, @01:48AM (21 children)
OK, but how many of those making those strong claims have abandoned their cars entirely? If not, then it's not much of an emergency. How many of them have stopped flying? If they haven't, then it isn't much of an emergency. How many of them have started growing their own food, super-insulating their homes, and cut way back on their conspicuous consumption? If they haven't done those things, then it's not much of an emergency.
During WWII people tore out their wrought-iron fences and brought in their old tires to recycle. They grew Victory gardens. They picked wild berries and made jam. They recycled absolutely everything. They rationed food. They biked instead of drove. They switched off lights and went dark at curfew to save fuel.
Those are the things that people do when there are real emergencies. I don't see any of those screaming the loudest now doing any of those things.
In other words, if those folks want to be taken seriously in these matters, then they ought to drop their iPhones and the endless social media narcissism and get their hands dirty.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @02:10AM (1 child)
Dummy
Sorry boomers but you gotta go. Please just recuse yourselves from society so you stop fucking it up.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @02:17PM
No, he's just doing the Fox News thing. When you find yourself in an indefensible position, divert, deflect, and blame the messenger. Whistleblower? Partisan hack! Thirty year Foreign Service career under many administrations? Deep State! Al Gore coherently raising climate change problems? Look how big his house is!!!!
I don't know if they realize how pathetic they look when they make those arguments, but it seems to raise their standing in each other's eyes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Monday October 28 2019, @03:59AM (10 children)
I'm always amazed when I see these sorts of comments because they're wrong on several levels, and at least one should be obvious to everyone. The most glaring flaw is that someone's personal actions have almost no baring on the truth value of their statements. A doctor telling his patient that smoking is unhealthy is true advice; the advice is no less true, nor the consequences less dire, for the doctor being a smoker himself. Putting carbon into the atmosphere is causing global warming, and that true statement remains true no matter how much carbon I personally contributed today.
Then there's the more subtle problem which deals with a sort of tragedy of the commons scenario, and the ultimate impact of a single person. If someone asks me what individual action they can take to fight climate change my answer is to vote, and vote for candidates who accept that AGW is real and prioritize addressing it. If someone asks me if there's anything else they can personally do to fight global warming, the answer is, well...not much. Go vegan, stop driving, and don't use air travel if you feel like it. But there's really nothing an individual can do as an individual that will solve this problem. It's too big, too complicated, too multifaceted. What we need are systemic changes at the national and international level. That's the only way to get billions of people to efficiently modify their behavior, which is what it's going to take to move the needle on carbon emissions.
For further reading you can start with David Wallace-Wells's excellent recent book, The Uninhabitable Earth. He addresses the flaws in the argument you and others make along these lines. It's fitting that you mentioned the depth and breadth of the war effort during the last century. Mobilization on the scale of WWII is, conservatively, the level of effort we would need to stop warming above 2.0C--which will still result in catastrophic warming and environmental change for millions of people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday October 28 2019, @04:10AM (7 children)
Thing is, an individual can influence global warming just as much as they can influence a national election. That is, hardly at all. But in both cases, it's critical that each person does what they can, for the collective effect.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @04:30AM (2 children)
Wooooooosh
I mean you get it, but at the same time you don't. Very strange.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @09:41AM (1 child)
Or someone has used reason to come to a conclusion you didn't. Whoosh.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @04:11PM
Nope, go look at the actual stats on pollution. Hint: the biggest polluters are not individuals.
Also, hard to get individuals on board when a significant percentage actively work against advocacy campaigns cuz "muh straws!!"
Keep running away from the problems, sure it'll hurt me and mine but yours as well.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 28 2019, @05:56AM (3 children)
Here's some things we can all do:
Don't mow the lawn as often. Even tell the local politicians you want lawn care ordinances softened or repealed. Losers: sellers of lawn care equipment and services. Winners: Everyone else, and the environment.
Push for smarter traffic lights. Losers: red light camera enforcement businesses. Winners: Everyone else, and the environment.
Trade up to a more fuel efficient car. Or an electric car. Improve the aerodynamics, as exemplified with the Aerocivic: https://aerocivic.com/ [aerocivic.com]
Add solar to your rooftop.
What is so exasperating are these spiteful people who would rather waste their own money and call conservation gay, than accept improvements in energy efficiency.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 28 2019, @02:21PM (2 children)
Move closer to work, or get a job closer to home. I'm about to close on a house that will bring my commute from 20 minutes down to 8. That will have more of an effect than getting a more efficient vehicle.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday October 28 2019, @07:19PM (1 child)
I just started riding the bus to work, raising my commute time from 45 minutes to 65 minutes. My costs have come down, though, as has my overall effect on the environment. I'm keeping my (non-hybrid) car because it's paid for.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:18PM
Yes, good ones, use public transport, and live closer to work.
Can you telecommute, maybe 1 or 2 days a week if not all 5? Lot of companies are too paranoid about employees goofing off when not under the watchful eye of a slavedriving manager. I very much liked not having to spend an extra hour every work day fighting rush hour traffic. Rush hour makes commute times 50% longer, and flex time to avoid the peak is the least a company can offer for a desk job.
Then there's suburban sprawl. A lawn is supposed to be some personal green space for you and your family, not a reason for a damned city to hammer you in yet another revenue extraction scheme, turning lawn care into a miserable chore rather than something relaxing. I'd rather not have a lawn at all and live closer to everything than have a postage stamp sized lot that city inspectors and busybody neighbors are watching constantly for violations.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @05:39AM
I think you're missing the point here. If people genuinely believed that the world was going to end unless 'a sufficient number' of people naked with a chicken on their hand screaming To Cthulu We Praise - then you'd see a shortage of chickens because you'd damn sure see the world suddenly overrun with people running around naked screaming about cthulu. If they didn't really believe it, but wanted to signal their faith to Cthulu they probably wouldn't do anything themselves, because who wants to run around screaming naked with a chicken on their head? But they'd certainly signal their Cthulu virtue by making sure to encourage everybody else to do something.
I think one of the clearest examples is on the coast. Most coastal areas tend to be urban areas. Many of these areas with absurdly high costs of living are ultra-liberal -- places like San Francisco, Palm Beach, etc. And indeed the hyper-wealthy in those areas are disproportionately you hyperactive pro-climate change folk. But isn't that kind of weird...? Spending, collectively, billions -likely trillions- of dollars on coastal properties that you're claiming will be destroyed within 50 years? And it's not like they'll be able to get out - once the real devastation hits and people see what's happening, the property values there will hit the gutter in a very short period of time. Yet not only is there no emigration from these coastal areas, there is an active migration towards them with an ever inflating coastal land value. This makes no sense if these people actually believe what they claim to believe.
Ultimately, I think a salient issue is that humans seem wired to need conflict. As absurd as that sounds, it's probably a big part of what drove our evolutionary success. When you're never content, you will always continue to grow - even long after you've become the most dominant force. The "problem" with this is that the developed world has entered into an unprecedented era of peace and stability. And that seems to be driving many people quite literally insane. It could, for instance, even go some way towards explaining the skyrocketing rates of mental illness in developed nations. Peace and stability is incredibly boring. We need to an enemy, we need a cause. An invisible ever-present enemy that can only be defeated by completely revolutionizing the entire world? Why, you'd make Sir Don Quixote himself blush!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @05:37AM
And yet as you say this, others who are running around with their hair on fire are imploring us as individuals to stop using plastic straws and to stop eating meat.
See, I rather subscribe to the "Be the Change You Want to See in the World" school of thought. You are correct that individually we can't do much to change what governments or the climate do, but we can certainly change what we as individuals do. At the very least we can refuse to be odious hypocrites.
So if there are people out there who believe that eating a vegan diet is the best thing they can do for the environment, then they should do that. Good for them. But those motherfuckers better not try to take my steak away from me.
If there are people who believe the world is overpopulated, then they should go have themselves sterilized or just refuse to have kids. I admire those who can practice what they preach. But goddamn them if they tell the rest of us we will be sterilized while they go have themselves 10 kids.
In other words, "big systemic changes" that are forced on everyone, top-down, sounds like every dystopian nightmare I have ever read of or every dystopian reality that has ever been. Remember collectivization under Stalin? That was a big systemic change. The Great Leap Forward was also. Or Lebensraum and the Tausend-Jahre Reich.
I believe in sustainable economies, and renewable energy. I believe in living lightly on the land. I have fought for those things my whole life. But what I abhor is how those noble things have been recently subverted by crypto-Marxists and proto-Gaians whose rhetoric is too chillingly close to the fervor last exhibited by the Red Guards.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 28 2019, @07:26AM (4 children)
That, exactly. We have a fine crop of doomsayers today, warning of the impending end of civilization, and even the end of "life as we know it". But, they all have such limited imaginations. They have failed to read history. They haven't shined a light into the darkest corners of history, to understand what mankind is like, when backed into a corner.
The really smart monkeys are already prepared, or preparing - and they are NOT making a lot of noise about it. They don't WANT the masses in the cities finding them. And, if the masses do find them, the masses will become fertilizer for the preparedness crops.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday October 28 2019, @11:16PM (3 children)
And you think of yourself as one of these shadowy elite, natch.
Here's a hint for you: the world your "elite" emerge to inhabit will be a living Hell. You will envy the dead, and join them in mass numbers. If civilization recovers at all, it will take decades or centuries, and it will happen with the shattered remnants of humanity implementing *exactly the things the people you refer to as alarmists have been saying to do for decades now.*
No matter what the climate is doing, even standing completely stock still, there is *never* a case where clean, sustainable energy is a bad thing. There is *never* a case where getting out from entangling clusterfuck resource wars with all their blowback and knock-on effects is the wrong geopolitical move. At no point in time is reducing fragility and eliminating cascading points of failure a bad investment.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @04:38AM
This is getting a bit absurd. Even the worst case scenarios for climate change are pretty tepid all things considered. You're looking at coastal regions becoming less habitable. 'Less habitable' not being a new-speak "de-energization" type thing, but a reference to the fact that there are already technological solutions being developed such as artificial floating islands and houses. Stuff already exists, but it's quite esoteric. Should that $20 million beach front property just become part of the ocean, there will be a significant increase in demand.
The temperature change itself is going to be even more innocuous. Earth has never been in an equilibrium state. All life we know of today, including ourselves, evolved through constant extreme changes in climate. Some lands will become less well developed towards agriculture, some more well developed. Some crops will become less efficient staples, some more efficient. And we're already seeing what's happening with the warming of oceans and coral - they adapt. Be less like a 900AD doomsday preacher, and more like a coral. Climate alarmism is seriously turning into a cult. It's quite interesting to watch it play out as it undoubtedly mimcs, on a much larger scale, the exact processes of formation in doomsday cults of times past.
That said I fully agree that increasing renewable energy utilization is obviously a great idea. Not even about the climate stuff, but about the need for more energy. The amount of energy that we can harvest from the sun dwarfs by an unimaginably large number of magnitudes the sum total of all possible energy exploitable from fossil fuels. At least in theory we could have near endless energy at a very negligible cost. But I think folks doing like you're doing turn people away from renewables. Perhaps without realizing it, you are poisoning the well because renewable energy, which is good, gets lumped in aside your Chicken Little 'divinations'. So if you truly care about climate, it might be wise to advocate for renewables outside of doomsday prophecies.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @05:56AM (1 child)
I fully agree with you there. I would even add that when you rely on others for your energy, then at the flick of a switch they can knock you back to the stone age or even kill you, as millions of PG&E customers in the Bay Area are learning to their yawning chagrin right now. But if you are your own little power plant then a bunch of nasty despots on the other side of the world lose all their power over you, as do all the Dick Cheneys and Halliburtons on this side of the world.
Well, that's a bit of a question of definitions, with a generous helping of Malthusian notions. In a world where civilization breaks down, who is an elite rather gets stood on its head, don't you think? Being a billionaire in pre-collapse civilization doesn't amount to a hill of beans post-collapse when a crack shot blows your head off and takes all your stuff. Some things will translate fine, because doctors are always needed, but it could be said that a man who can feed his family with hunting and fishing is more of an elite then than a star bond trader who can't properly toast a pop tart.
So, the bit about that that I suspect you would really hate is that the people you politically dislike the most are best positioned to be the new elites in that disaster scenario, in that they have real skills to farm, craft, build, and defend that coddled urbanites don't have.
And while we're waxing Malthusian, it might be worth considering what has happened with previous boughts of climate change. The Little Ice Age occurred, and civilization survived. The Sahara turned to desert, and humans survived. The Middle East turned much more arid since Roman times, and civilization survived. People and societies have proven themselves more adaptible in the past than many now are giving them credit for. It's too bad, because personally I find it inspiring and a great message of hope that life finds a way.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:04AM
I had the pleasure of getting to live through a violent military coup. Automatic gunfire exchanges punctuated with the occasional explosion happening about a kilometer from my home was fun - trying to look up to determine the max wall thickness a stray M16 bullet could penetrate at that distance. Yeah, oddly enough - the internet did not go down.
This only lasted a couple of weeks, but gave a pretty good flavor for what happens. And as you mentioned money becomes pretty much useless almost instantly. There are no stores open so there's nothing to buy for money, and you really don't want to be out on the streets in any case. And even in barter it loses any meaning. How many dollars is a sack of rice or some bottled fresh water worth? Food and water keeps you alive. What do dollar bills do? Obviously nobody knew how long this was going to last and so nobody was looking to sell their stores, although people did barter and there was also quite a lot of sharing.
However, there was very much a persisted elite. It was the organized forces with guns - the military. In this case they were mostly benevolent and the military is exactly what stopped the situation from getting much out of control. They kept dependent folks provisioned and dealt with looters and thieves brutally enough that even that was kept at least somewhat in line. I cannot even imagine what it would have been like to live through things such as the Siege of Sarajevo [wikipedia.org] where the military was actively attacking civilians.
It completely changed my worldview. Before the coup started I was idiotic and naive. There were signs of what was coming everywhere such as armed guards being deployed to strategically important locations (such as train stations), but the media simply reported it as a security precaution. To elaborate there the coup was driven by political infighting. The two major parties had become openly hostile to one another and violence had occasionally spread to the streets through protests and what not. The military apparently got sick of it and decided to take over the government themselves. In any case though I dismissed the signs since it wasn't some huge buildup - you'd just have a few guards here, a few guards there, a couple of camo trucks, and so on. So one day everything is 'lol, let's take a picture with the guard' - the next day everything is shut down, there's intermittent gunfire, and you're on your own.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday October 28 2019, @01:24PM
> how many of those making those strong claims...
Just anecdotally, many of folks I know who moan about this stuff do indeed commute by bike, grow most of their own fruit and some veg, run the heating a couple of degrees lower, etc etc.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @09:53PM (1 child)
For whatever it's worth:
I do not drive a car. I mostly use my human powered bicycle or public transport. Trams and trains are pretty great.
I have not traveled by airplane in many years.
I cannot grow my own food because I rent a third floor apartment, so I do not have access to a garden. (because housing costs are skyrocketing in this country, NL)
I am saving up, preparing to buy a house with a garden eventually. (I'll have to be careful where to move to, because the city where live now -Rotterdam- will be permanently flooded eventually unlike we raise the dykes by ridiculous sizes, at tremendous cost)
I have the thermostat set to a low value to minimize my heater natural gas consumption, and I use lots of clothing in winter. Luckily, the building is already pretty well insulated.
I try to avoid meat in my diet, even though I love eating meat, because the production chain and puts such a strain on the climate.
I try to educate people on the urgency of the problem.
These are just a few of the very basic things in my daily life that I am doing right now as a tiny individual in a large system. If I had any capital to invest, I'd already have invested it in renewable power.
The fact that so many people seem to be apathetic or even hostile towards large systematic changes and measures to combat climate change makes my blood boil. Current emissions rates will result in roughly 2 meters of sea level rise within this century alone.
In one or two centuries, the entire western half of my country will likely be permanently flooded. All of those people will need to find homes elsewhere. (unless we invent floating cities or something)
We as a developed nation might be able to build enormous and expensive dykes and stay safe. In that case, the salt water will rise up through the water table due to pressure and will kill the crops, destroying the agriculture sector.
And we are not the only country that will be fucked in all sorts of ways due to rising sea levels. They will make the current refugee and migration issues in Europe and the USA seem trivial compared to what is next.
https://www.vn.nl/rising-sea-levels-netherlands/ [www.vn.nl]
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/the-question-is-not-if-the-netherlands-will-disappear-below-sea-level-but-when [www.uu.nl]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 29 2019, @06:07AM
Those measures are admirable. I do them, too. Except, I don't buy in to veganism. The diet itself is fine, and I have eaten that way myself for half years at a time. But I reject their assertion that the diet is more environmentally friendly than eating meat. They're both carbon neutral until you want to truck them around, and then a ton of beef weighs exactly the same as a ton of vegetables. Also, a good test of that conviction is to tell a condescending vegan that you only eat meat you hunt/fish yourself, and that you love it, and watch the eyes roll back in their heads and spittle froth on their lips as they try to parse the carbon footprint of that one, because that elk hanging in your garage has a fraction of the carbon footprint of the organic kale they had imported from South America.
As for the rising sea levels and Holland, well, the Dutch are incredible engineers and intensely practical people. They'll solve it. The Bangladeshis will be screwed, unless they get smart and send their best and brightest young people to learn civil engineering in the Netherlands. I dunno, I'd say that one way the Dutch can kill two birds with one stone is to take all the world's refuse the Chinese are now refusing and glassify it and use it as fill for their low-lying areas. Or just use red worms. Red worms are quite speedy composters and can transform all kinds of things into soil at astonishing rates.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 28 2019, @02:08AM (11 children)
Pay attention next time. I didn't object to taking care of the environment, I objected to hysterical fools making ridiculous predictions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @02:12AM (10 children)
If there is one positive from all your shitposting it is to make me glad I'm not you. Sadly I've met enough of your type and it is depressing how many idiots walk around thinking they've got it all figured out. Bonus points for ignoring experts over shitty science journalism.
(Score: 2, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 28 2019, @02:36AM (8 children)
The "experts" have been wrong every single time they predicted utter disaster very soon. It makes me think some folks don't know the meaning of the word very well.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Monday October 28 2019, @03:04AM (6 children)
I am still smarting over some investments I made in oil and gas...as I took peak oil seriously.
I had Warren Buffet, president Bush, and a helluva lot of scientists telling me this was real.
I listened to them, and actually believed them.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @03:55AM (5 children)
> as I took peak oil seriously.
So did I (but didn't invest except as part of an index fund). And it was nearly true too, my natural gas heating bill in NE USA was climbing steadily ~10 years ago. Then along came fracking in PA (and other states) and it turned out that there was more gas still down there.
Will there be technology to get even more fossil fuel once the fracked deposits run low, or has this bit of expensive* technology just pushed peak oil out some years?
* expensive in terms of both $$$ and the environmental cleanup required.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Monday October 28 2019, @07:33PM
I'm betting the new peak oil is a peak in market demand, as other sources of energy continue to replace fossil fuels. Of course, supply limitations will show up as consumption limitations, so the two are similar in effect. The main difference is the price. As demand decreases, the price tends lower; as supply decreases (hypothetically, in a peak oil scenario), prices increase.
Here [timogrossenbacher.ch] is an interactive infographic that suggests that oil usage has already peaked in some areas. Maybe that's a short-term turnaround because of economic difficulties, but the monotonic increases expected by the peak oil theory are not there in many locations around the world.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:07AM (3 children)
If you wanted your energy to be cheap, you could have just stayed with your traditional sources, and given people rebates. Fracking is a sign that you are really really desperate to inefficiently try and squeeze fuel out of a stone, it's not the success story you're claiming it it, when looked at rationally, it's proof of abject failure.
It could well also be one of the things that brings down your economy too, enjoy that bust: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/will-fracking-industry-debts-set-off-financial-tremors/
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:45AM (2 children)
*blinks a few times*
That was a spectacularly, eye-wateringly ignorant analysis of the oilfield economy; I'm shocked that a university was willing to put its name on it. Wharton has a pretty good reputation, too; pity.
Here's my I-have-5-minutes-before-leaving-for-work rebuttal:
The authors of the article didn't seem to grasp any of this. They seem to have heard of some production companies going bankrupt, and did the bare minimum of research needed to publish an *opinion* piece in the Times. I'm not impressed.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 29 2019, @07:33PM (1 child)
I normally take articles in fields I'm not so familiar with with a pinch of salt unless I have heard widespread (i.e. explicitly not partisan, either truly independent or multi-/bi-partisan) support for the reputation of the department, or individual author, behind an article. I will confess that "Wharton" is one of the names that put me in a "should be trustworthy" mode before I've read a single word. They're boring, they're old-fashioned, they seem to be proper academics. Or so I thought - perhaps that's misplaced. Now I want to see the source of the data - the source of the money, and the sinks. The oft-repeated 280 billion figure must have come from somewhere. (Sometimes that somewhere is thin air, or an "extrapolation", or somewhere less sunlight accessible - chinese whispers are *terrible* at the interfaces between academia and journalism.)
Most of the articles I read do corroborate each other, but I have no idea how independent they are. But when you read quotes from a CEO of a natural gas producer like calling fracking an "unmitigated disaster" (I forget the exact quote, it was short of swearing, but was pretty damn blunt) for investors, it kinda supports the thesis that it's a money-hole and won't pay off.
Anyway, thanks for your contribution to the thread.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zinho on Tuesday October 29 2019, @11:14PM
I know, right? It's part of the UPenn system, and I started off the read giving them the benefit of the doubt as well. I really expected more.
The article got quite a few things right, as far as the finances go. Pension funds have been throwing a bunch of money around, and it flooded the market with money banks were anxious to lend. It's part and parcel with the mortgage crisis; the banks wanted to lend money so badly, they made many bad loans. Then when the price of oil started spiking and exploration companies started asking for capital to rent rigs, the banks were happy to lend.
Rigs aren't cheap: ocean-going rigs can cost millions of dollars a day to rent. Even land rigs can run in the hundreds of thousands per day, and drilling takes weeks. Active rig count in the U.S. land market peaked at over 1500, [tradingeconomics.com] so if those were being financed instead of paid for in cash that would be ~$50 Billion per year invested in exploration, and ~5 years of that gets you to a cool $250 Billion easy. If they borrowed that money on the assumption that the produced oil would sell at $100/bbl and instead they're only getting $25-70 [cnbc.com] they aren't going to be able to pay their loans.
The majors (Exxon, Shell, National Oil Companies like Aramco) aren't taking on loans, of course; it's the small players like Chesapeake that are vulnerable here. And the well owners that have cash reserves instead of debts are reacting to the oversupply and price drops by shutting down production. They're waiting for the price to recover: the oil isn't going anywhere if they don't pump it. The smart ones are still drilling while the rigs are cheap; when the price comes back up and rig time gets expensive again they'll simply uncap their wells and have all the capital they need. Meanwhile, the ones that took on too much debt are in really bad shape, and we'll probably see quite a few of them go bankrupt. Sucks for the banks, sucks for the well owners, and life goes on for the rest of us.
One last thing: this quote is killing me.
Even assuming they meant "oil and gas exploration companies" instead of "service companies", I think their analysis was wrong. in 2014 the U.S. was trying to put political pressure on both Venezuela [wikipedia.org] and Russia, [wikipedia.org] and the timing of the Saudi production bump coincided surprisingly well with that. Worked a treat on Venezuela, not so much on Russia. This seemed pretty obvious to most people in the oil & gas industry, not sure who would have been saying that it was targeting small US exploration companies.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @12:51PM
- Otto Van Bismark, 1888
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @06:42AM
You must mean listening only to the experts you approve of?
Can I listen to an MIT atmospheric physicist specializing in the dynamics of atmospheric systems? He's published hundreds of papers, worked on the IPCC's first two reports and was a leader author on the IPCC's 3rd annual report (climate processes and feedbacks section), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and much much more? Guess not because he's [cato.org] suggested that our climate alarmism is completely unjustified. In particular our current climate models fail even on their own training data. He feels that the reason is a fundamental error on how CO2 effects the climate. He believes temperature responds non-linearly at scale to CO2, as opposed to the "consensus" view of a linear reaction. The net effect is that even unrestrained emissions will likely have an impact, but mostly a negligible one, on Earth.
He has compared the current consensus on climate change to the consensus, not long ago, on the merit of eugenics. The point there is intentionally nontechnical. Any person could see that mandatory eugenics is an awful and extremely dangerous system. How then did it become the ubiquitous view in policy, science, education, and society in general? Because of social pressure. When people feel that they "should" think something, they are too quick to dismiss their own personal reservations for fear of being seen as a pariah, even when they know, deep down, that what the position they've chosen to adopt is wrong. Similarly too in climate today. What is your impression of somebody who might suggest that climate alarmism is unjustified? Probably not good, but that is not an organic reaction. What do you think of somebody who might suggest that there's good reason to suggest that spacetime is not asymptotically flat? You probably have no opinion and are likely equally uninformed on both topics. Yet you form a strong opinion on one because of social pressures.
And your bias there is widely shared. That leads to unquestioning support of a hypothesis that deserves much more questioning. We'd like to imagine that science is driven entirely by objective merit, but one needs only the vaguest familiarity with history to realize how unjustified that ideal is. It was no less than Max Planck who witted, "Science advances one funeral at a time." And that was at a time before science became so radically politicized as it has in modern times.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Monday October 28 2019, @09:06AM
As a kid, I might point out that if X affects the military, then X already destroyed the civilians.
As the military I would be more concerned about gold plated planes which won't probably stand a chance against specialized or pilot less crafts. About becoming a for profit corporation with no real duty towards the country. About Nations being already swallowed by the one system.
TFS seems to shift the blame of a programmed collapse on global warming which means in ultimate analysis, YOU. You are guilty of existing. It doesn't matter that your forefathers lived in perfect equilibrium with nature and we're dragged by the hair into the modern polluted age by the same guys that are shouting "ecology!!! Overpopulation!!" Now.
Soooo what are the adults saying? Me curious.
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