
If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get - marcusgarvey
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/upshot/if-we-dig-out-all-our-fossil-fuels-heres-how-hot-we-can-expect-it-to-get.html
======
diafygi
The three options in the article are accurate (tax, compete, or capture). I
work in solar, and the consensus in the industry is that #2 is happening first
(solar and wind are currently replacing coal). #1 will start to happen over
the next few decades as the effects of climate change have more of an impact
on society (e.g. the California drought). #3 won't likely happen since #1 will
probably be cheaper.

Anyway, I'm a chemical engineer from UT-Austin, so most of my graduating class
went into oil. I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not
retire in the oil industry.

Finally, I don't understand why more entrepreneurs don't do startups in
energy. 87% of the world energy sources will have to change in the next 35
years. To most, that sounds scary. However, to an entrepreneur like me, that
sounds like a huge ceiling.

~~~
msandford
> I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the
> oil industry.

I'm also in oil & gas right now and I suspect that you're going to lose,
though not because the industry is going to grow. It's going to shrink
strictly based on out-of-the-ground production.

But the oil companies aren't huge, they're gigantic. And they're not going to
just roll over and die. If tomorrow someone gets a working LFTR going you can
be sure that all the majors are going to spend a LOT of money trying to buy
said company and scale it up.

And the oil companies already own tremendous amounts of assets re: liquid
fuels so they'd just start plopping reactors down in the middle of their
plants and start producing DME (for diesel) or whatever the gas equivalent is
out of various feedstocks.

It'd take a decade or two to finally make the transition, but I really think
that's where things are going. The oil companies regularly spend billions
getting leases on land, drilling, production assets, etc. To spend $10b (or
$100b even) on buying a 'safe nuclear' technology to avoid going out of
business I suspect wouldn't generate too many waves.

So they'll be sort-of reinvented, but still largely themselves. The majors
aren't necessarily oil companies anymore, but energy companies. We're going to
see them slowly change or die, but I suspect most will transition successfully
just because they have so much money under "management" that it'll be hard to
screw up too badly.

~~~
guelo
That wouldn't be the oil industry anymore.

~~~
msandford
> That wouldn't be the oil industry anymore.

What is the oil industry then? I mean, there are probably a bunch of different
definitions. The "oil industry" does a lot of stuff.

1\. explores for oil

2\. obtains mineral rights to the oil it suspects is in the ground

3\. does test drilling to determine if oil is in fact there

4\. does production drilling to make it feasible to extract any oil it does
find

5\. sets up production equipment to extract the oil from the ground

6\. establishes a logistics chain to move the crude oil coming out of the
ground to a refinery (truck, train, pipeline, etc)

7\. builds and maintains many-multi-billion dollar refineries

8\. uses said refineries to turn crude oil into a multitude of products like
various gasses, butane, naptha, grades of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, greases
and lubricants, waxes and various other byproducts

9\. establishes supply lines to ship finished products to various markets
domestically and internationally

10\. trades in the energy markets to ensure that prices across the world
properly reflect transport and other costs (arbitrage by virtue of known
internal costs)

11\. develops new equipment, techniques and strategies to make any of the
above mentioned things more efficient, cheaper, easier, etc

So while I agree that 1-5 might end up changing, that's far from the entirety
of "the oil industry" and thus I think my statement isn't entirely wrong.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I thought the refineries had been turned into separate corporate entities.
Which means they have to be profitable. They're having a hard time doing that,
with razor-sharp margins and fluctuating demand.

~~~
msandford
Yeah, most of the majors are actually about 20 different companies each now.
They're technically separate and they pretend to actually be separate, but
people from one company "suggest" what people from another should do and of
course they do. Because they're really just one big company in reality.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Well, they're 'really' 20 different companies with a long history of
cooperation. Refineries pretty much have to pay attention to their suppliers
and customers because they're a captive market with no ability to remarket or
rebrand.

------
cpeterso
The cheap and easy energy of fossil fuels made the leap to modern civilization
possible. Beyond the environmental and social impacts of continuing to use
fossil fuels when alternatives exist, would (hypothetically) post-apocalyptic
humanity be able to reboot civilization if all the easy fossil fuels have been
mined?

~~~
codeulike
Probably not. If we fuck this up, no beings around here are going to get
another attempt at industrial civilization for millions of years - all the
lower rungs on the ladder have been burnt away.

~~~
mooreds
Right. And that is the most terrifying piece of it all. Most of the people I
know either don't think about it or think the magic of science and innovation
will rescue us. But if we fall below a certain level of expertise, we will be
gkbers. You can't make solar panels with charcoal fires.

I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life
is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to
the mice.

Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a
species. But is this time really different?

~~~
jerf
"mice munching on grain from an overturned truck.... But is this time really
different?"

Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as
passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly
incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge
really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types.

The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting
question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your
metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being
anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-
based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are
right now.

~~~
mooreds
I appreciate your comment. Sometimes I feel I am too pessimistic, but either
way you're correct that it's not a precise metaphor. I do feel like the
majority of humans (including myself, most of the time) are more like the mice
than not--from what I see it's a minority that are pushing the bounds of
knowledge. Of course, a small percent of 7B people is a large absolute number.

Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be
made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current
standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm
calling you one) don't really get EROEI:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested)

Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole
game changes.

------
nosuchthing
"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us
see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just
edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see
it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by
surprise out of the corner of your eye." [0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem)

------
guscost
> protecting the world from climate change requires the even more difficult
> task of disrupting today’s energy markets.

Let's not mince words, the plan is and has been to manipulate the energy
market through coercive authority. Calling this "disrupting" is the most
cringe-worthy instance of that term I've ever seen in print (and there is a
lot of competition).

~~~
fit2rule
On the flipside, I've always considered 'disruption' in the modern sense to be
precisely that: coercive authority. Its what programmers do.

~~~
guscost
Do you mean "hacking"?

~~~
fit2rule
No, I mean software development efforts which clearly disrupt the target
industries of interest. It seems to me that programming is precisely the
effort of executing authority over a subject using technology.

~~~
guscost
The object of "coerce" has to be a person or group of people, or maybe any
entity that can be intimidated if you prefer. The dictionary isn't totally
explicit about this but it's the meaning I'm going for.

~~~
fit2rule
Well, look at all the Taxi drivers who are being coerced into becoming Uber
drivers ..

------
tim333
The calculation seems a bit dubious. They apparently assume a linear
relationship between carbon emitted and temperature change. "Following the
National Academy of Sciences (2011), we take 1.75°C per 1,000 GtC emitted as
the central best estimate."

However doubling CO2 does not double the amount of radiation it absorbs. CO2
absorbs at certain particular wavelengths and even if you make the atmosphere
100% CO2 it can only absorb all the light at those wavelengths and remain
clear at others. In fact replacing everything in the atmosphere, including
water vapour with CO2 would probably make the Earth cooler as the biggest
green house effect is from water vapour.

There's some discussion here, admittedly from a skeptical source without full
citations suggesting far lower warming from increases in CO2.

[http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-
of-c...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-
greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/)

------
lisa_henderson
The title says "All Our Fossil Fuels" but they really mean something like "all
the fossil fuels we are likely to dig up given reasonable economic
assumptions." If they really meant "all" the fossil fuel, the results would be
worse than they suggest.

If you consider this:

"The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed.
Average temperatures were higher than today by about 18 degrees F (10 degrees
C)."

[http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-...](http://what-
when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-warming/)

Then this seems a bit odd:

"an astonishing 16.2 degrees"

That sounds accurate if they mean Celsius but this is the New York Times,
which I believe uses Fahrenheit as a matter of style, and they write:
"Scientists predict global disaster at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-
industrial temperatures; there is enough fossil fuel extracted and within
reach to raise temperatures 16.2 degrees" which confirms the use of
Fahrenheit.

It's frightening to consider the impact it would have if we really did dig up
all the fossil fuel, including the stuff that we probably won't be able to
reach. It's worth thinking about, since technological breakthroughs now allow
us to reach a great deal of fossil fuel that was considered uneconomic 30
years ago and, likewise, 30 years from now we might be able to reach fossil
fuel that we now consider unreachable.

Assuming large concentrations of life, allowing the formation of fossil fuels,
starts with the Cambrian, or a bit after, we can say that "all our fossil
fuels" refers to the deposits that built up over the course of 500 million
years. If we dug all of that up and burned all of it, then we should arrive at
a temperature that is a bit hotter than anything that ever occurred before. If
the Mesozoic saw average temperatures that were 10 degrees Celsius higher than
today, then something like 16 degrees Celsius would be a reasonable guess. Or
higher.

~~~
pdonis
_> The climate of the Cretaceous_

The Cretaceous isn't when the fossil fuels were formed; that was much earlier,
during the Carboniferous. Global temperatures don't actually correlate very
well over geologic time scales with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil
fuels:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Flu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Fluctuations_during_the_remainder_of_the_Phanerozoic)

~~~
lisa_henderson
You misread the sentence. The comparison is being made to the Mesozoic. That
is, the Mesozoic was much hotter than the Cretaceous. I can not imagine what
you mean when you write "Global temperatures don't correlate ... with the
amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels." I never suggested any such
thing. But we do know that carbon can increase the temperature, and if we dig
up an amount of carbon that was buried over 500 million years and we burn it
all during a 200 or 300 year time span, then presumably we end up with more
carbon in the air, at one time, than ever occurred before, and therefore we
should expect the temperature to spike to a level never seen before.

~~~
pdonis
_> The comparison is being made to the Mesozoic. That is, the Mesozoic was
much hotter than the Cretaceous._

Um, you do know that the Cretaceous is _part of_ the Mesozoic, right? And that
our fossil fuels were not formed during any part of the Mesozoic; they were
formed during the Carboniferous, which is part of the Paleozoic, right?

 _> I can not imagine what you mean when you write "Global temperatures don't
correlate ... with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels."_

I mean just what I said: global temperatures don't correlate very well with
the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels. Even the amount of CO2 in
the air, over the last 600 million years or so, does not correlate well with
the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels. If that were true, we would
expect to see lots of CO2 before the Carboniferous, very little CO2 from then
to now, then a lot now. That is not what we see when we look at the record.
See, for example, here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#Past_concentration)

 _> if we dig up an amount of carbon that was buried over 500 million years
and we burn it all during a 200 or 300 year time span, then presumably we end
up with more carbon in the air, at one time, than ever occurred before_

And if you look up the actual levels of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last
600 million years or so, you will see that this is not even close to being
true. CO2 levels have been in the _thousands_ of PPM during the period between
the Carboniferous and now, even though all that carbon was buried in fossil
fuels. The current epoch is one of very low CO2 concentrations in geologic
terms, even counting the recent increase due to our burning fossil fuels.

------
rjsw
I'm not sure this kind of headline is helpful. We should try to stop burning
fossil fuels but that will mean that we can use them to produce petrochemicals
for longer, the known reserves still have value.

~~~
alphapapa
Who is "we"? Does that include people living in practically pre-industrial
societies in places like parts of Africa?

------
jack9
We are going to have waste heat gather in our atmosphere, from whatever energy
sources we attempt to capture, and use and store. This move toward renewables,
doesn't solve the problem. We need a lever to offload waste heat and we aren't
even looking at it in the proper perspective. Eventually, it looks like we'll
be living underground, no matter what solutions we devise in this next 1000
year interim.

~~~
maxerickson
At the moment, human energy utilization barely registers compared to the power
of the sun.

It's going to be an awful long time before our energy utilization shows up in
the temperature of the atmosphere.

