Ferarris don't contribute at all to global warming relatively. The many Gulfstream's and 747's the wealthy own are actually statistically significant in terms of impact.
Heck, I know they're hybrids but just look formula one. The total emissions of every car, from all sessions at every single race in a year combined produce less emissions than a one way flight from London to New York. Which is then completed negated by the fact that the drivers all take private jets around the world
i don't think that's a good comparison. think how many flights a single F1 race "causes". Not just the team members, theirs cars and equipment, but the millions of fans traveling to races around the world.
There is no carbon neutral fuel before we have a surplus of carbon neutral energy. Currently, any kWh you use to synthesize fuel could instead be used for something else. It's probably less carbon intensive to keep on burning regular fuel, because it takes a lot of energy to make synfuel.
Of course it's nice that they subsidize R&D for synfuels (we might need them for niche applications after all), but selling them as "carbon neutral" is just greenwashing.
How do your links counter my argument that any kWh spent on creating synfuel could be used for something else instead and as long as we don't have a surplus of carbon free energy all the carbon free electricity used in this way needs to be compensated by fossil fuels somewhere else in the grid?
I don't think this argument makes any sense. Just because there can be better uses for additional clean energy, does not make the additional energy any less clean.
By this definition, no source is clean, because there are always "better uses" for energy.
The honest way is using the average CO2/kWh for the grid you're plugged into (including the CO2 emitted for constructing the power plants with some discounting function) to estimate how much carbon your synfuel releases.
The House of Saud, for some time, has attempted and failed to diversify away from oil wealth for when the time comes they can no longer rely on it. Norway, arguably, will reach that point soon (as they’ve bootstrapped electric mobility and can now deprecate existing petroleum supply chains, both for domestic use and for export).
Be like Norway and use the time you have left selling a natural resource wisely, because bans and cross border tariffs are coming, and you’ll be left with what you could build during your transition when the revenue dries up. Hopefully as a country, you don’t end up empty handed.
(Norway also supplies the UK with a large amount of clean hydro power, roughly 690MW continuous, through a newly commissioned underwater HVDC transmission line, so it’s not all dirty fossil exports)
How much of Boeing's aircraft fleet on which you worked is powered by those same fossil fuels?
Hypocritical facile criticism is hypocritically facile.
What's notable about Norway is that back in 1968, as the country was first becoming aware of its oil wealth through the newly-realised North Sea deposits (shared with the UK), the country had the foresight to tap the advice of an Iraqi ex-pat who advised the country to invest its oil funds for national growth, infrasturcture, and sustainability, and not squander it in corruption and gratuitous expenditures as so many other countries had and would.
The consequence is that we can now face the ironic but heartening fact that, yes, an oil-producing and exporting country is now positioned as amongst the more prepared for a post-fossil-fuel economy and civilisation.
If you find yourself in a lifeboat with limited supplies and rations, it's not unwise to make use of those rations. It is unwise to squander those rations for purposes other than reaching safety. And it's extraordinarily unwise to criticise those who are using those rations to achieve a safer state.
How much oil is needed to produce a single electric vehicle? What I am getting at is we will need oil extraction for a long time. While we can move away from burning it for heat, we still need it for the production of most plastics. This doesn't even begin to touch on oil's use in the extraction process of all the other metals used in car production.
We also need oil for road building. I don't see that changing anytime either. After all, asphalt production produces far fewer greenhouse gasses than cement. Concrete roads have their place but the vast majority of road miles will be made with asphalt for the near future.
Given that all the plastics and most synthetic fabrics are petrol derivatives I don't think it'll ever die.
90% of everything in your direct line of sight probably contain petrol derivatives. From wall paint to shampoo, your t-shirt, phone, chewing gums, toothpaste, rugs, shoes... We just can't sustain our modern lifestyle without it
A combination of both really. Also included is the transportation of raw materials to production facilities. To be fair, however, these costs exist for non-electric cars to some degree.
Asphalt is itself very energy inefficient, and finding a replacement is rather important. Quoting kurzgesagt, the impact if manufacturing an electric car is equal to just two meters of asphalt road.
On top of that, asphalt is very easy to recycle and is likely the most recycled material on the planet by weight. My original point was that we will still need to extract some oil for a long time into the future.
> How much oil is needed to produce a single electric vehicle?
And wood energy was used to jumpstart the fossil fuel energy age. There was a transition period before fossil fuel energy became the dominant way to extract more fossil fuels. Now wood for energy is economically negligible in advanced economies.
As a Norwegian I totally agree with you. It is not just unethical, but stupid to invest so much in searching for new old fields. When demand for oil drops, Norway could have a Kodak moment.
> Norway has a sovereign wealth fund (valuation: 1.4T in USD) that is setup specifically for this eventuality.
That's not much - $25K per person over 10 years, and with an average income of $70K per person, and something like half of their economy is energy (most if not all social programs are funded from energy production).
If oil were to stop tomorrow, they'd have around 10 years before the money runs out. (Maybe a bit longer since kids don't earn money.) And if they have to replace all the social funding, they'd have even less time.
Norway is relying on slow reduction in demand, and time to transition their economy. Will they have it? It's far from certain. I feel like Norwegians rely too much on this fund to save themselves, rather than transitioning away from oil now.
There are lots of pushes to move the fund into carbon-neutral or negative investments, which would likely grow as the fossil fuel economy swan song starts.
However, I find it a bit disingenuous to chide Norway which is doing far better than much larger countries like the UK, US or Germany in transitioning to renewables.
I am not worried for Norway (though when the North Atlantic jetbtream shifts they will likely suffer) - I'm far more worried for the poor and marginalized peoples - they will suffer far more.
It's no surprise that thought leaders are worried about climate change impacts. Some will perversely benefit (politicians who are anti-immigration will gain populartiy because climate migrations are clearly defined by US defense dept as a likely result from climate change). Others may benefit by providing mitigating solutions to climate change itself that alter economies.
The income from the wealth fund doesn't need to replace oil income forever, it should be used to invest in growing other parts of their economy. For example, Equinor is getting into offshore wind and carbon sequestration both of which use similar competencies to oil production.
Anyway, they are still extracting oil and probably will continue to do so for a couple decades. That gives them time to grow their wealth fund and gradually transition their economy. They are at a huge advantage compared to other oil exporters.
As I see it, Kodak saw the writing on the wall pretty early, started R&D for digital camera ahead of the pack, and actually built the first working digital camera we know of. But it failed to put as much weight behind the new product line as it did on the money making ones.
That's basically a text book example of the "strategy tax", which isn't about stopping profit from existing products, but to let new concepts cannibalise legacy products.
In which way do you see Norway hitting the brakes on new technology and future trends to protect the oil business ?
Geezus, must be nice to have that kind of rainy day fund. Grossly over-simplifed: "Shut down the economy? Oh well, here's 80 billion dollars to keep everyone fed and warm."
Stopping it would be useless, it'd just increase production from oil wells of other countries. They could invest that money into accelerating green technology.
To a first order effect, stopping production would decrease supply, increasing price, and therefore decreasing demand and therefore overall oil usage, shifting some energy to alternative sources.
Of course second order effects might dwarf that, like the fact that increasing prices would incentivize oil extraction in currently unprofitable locations. That extraction may or may not be more carbon-intensive than Norway's (though probably more if it's currently unprofitable).
It sounds punchy to say "Norway should stop extracting oil" as much as it does to say "It doesn't matter whether they do or not since someone else will", but the reality is much more complex than either of those simplistic zeroth-order approximations.
Precisely. If oil prices get high enough, the Canadian oil sands will begin to be a profitable operation again, and will scale back up to take advantage. At this point, while we're still weaning off of oil - for probably the next 50 years - we need the lowest carbon, least cannibalistic sources of it possible.
Infrastructure takes time to build. A short term price hike in oil costs isn’t going to change how many cars Tesla can manufacture tomorrow. Near term you can build up infrastructure to extract more oil from the same well faster than you can build a new car factory.
The only real change from such a policy is how quickly wells will run dry, but I hope we can abandon oil long before running out is a serious concern.
Only if there was a large pact of countries doing so. But even that would be dubious, since OPEC and other groups would just increase production. Also there are many oil resources that can be tapped with a slight increase in the prices, so really Norway would just be handing production over to countries like Canada, where local governments would be only too eager to sell the more expensive product.
