Curious, does anyone know if the US govt is filling the reserve now, or even adding capacity? With oil so incredibly cheap right now, now is the absolute best time to be building and expanding our reserves.
Right now we can, yes. There's nothing that guarantees that will continue to be the case in the future. If we could accurately predict future changes in market conditions, nobody would ever need stockpiles.
If anything, the writing is on the wall for American oil production. The current low prices are mainly a manufactured attempt to bankrupt oil producers with higher overhead costs.
> The shale oil in the ground is a perfectly good stockpile as is.
I think the point people are trying to make is that it's quite a bit less expensive to buy crude and store it right now than to extract it from shale in the future.
They aren’t making that argument, they are making the ludicrous argument that moving a fraction of 1% of our oil supplies from one hole to another at taxpayer expense somehow protects us from something.
Even if they were it’s not the purpose of government to gamble public money on market timing bets. Oil has a history of always getting cheaper.
Plenty of private funds are going to be spent in the energy market in these bets.
Well, we have a bunch of call options at $40 (50% of American shale is viable there, probably more if labour costs drop). Given that, the downside is capped so that reduces the need to stockpile, and hyper-optimize this stuff.
Sorry, I was being metaphorical. Shale becomes viable at $40 so the US has practically unlimited oil if prices hit $40. There's no need to hedge against. America has a natural resources hedge.
You're forgetting the opportunity cost. $3B spent on buying something you don't really need but that might save you some cash in the future, versus $3B saving lives today.
Does opportunity cost really exist when print money? You can print 3 billion to do this. Or not. Unclear if it would change the inflation of our currency.
> Does opportunity cost really exist when print money? You can print 3 billion to do this. Or not. Unclear if it would change the inflation of our currency.
Just because the US can transmute solvency risk into inflation risk doesn't mean that the cost goes away.
Sure, but you measure it very different compared to a man standing around with $100 in his pocket. It's more like a man with a money press in his pocket.
No it didn't, commercial fracking had existed for almost 30 years during the '79 crisis.
It was horizontal drilling that made it cheaper.
That doesn't necessarily mean that these things will be cheap in the future. There are plenty of social, economic, or political events that could change that.
> Why on earth did they frame this as a "bailout for big oil"?
Because that is exactly what it is. You're talking about the largest companies in the world, they've have decades and decades of war and subsidy supporting them.
They don't need more support now, especially considering the environmental destruction they cause. Now is a much better time to push forward higher quality energy production technology like solar, wind, batteries, etc.
Yes. But just like various items in demand now ( ventilators, masks and so on ), it is not a bad idea to have a strategic reserve of those for those times when they would be necessary. I am a alternative energy proponent, but it seems misguided to simply ignore current situation and not take steps beneficial to the taxpayer ( buy stuff while it is cheap ).
The other side of the argument appears to want to cause maximum amount of pain to force people to move to the other sources. I understand that argument. I do not really buy it. National stockpile should not be subject to that. It serves a strategic purpose.
why would now, while we're in the midst of a public health crisis and the ensuing economic turmoil, be a good time to radically change our energy infrastructure to something that still has a higher unit cost?
I can obviously see that, politically, now is a good opportunity to push agendas that would otherwise not be accepted, but does that really make it a good time overall?
It's not a good time at all. Even if you put the cost and reliability problems aside for a moment, the entire planet's supply chains are massively disrupted and largely shut down. Plus, even if you could get the equipment manufactured, installing it is a health hazard right now - it means lots of people from all over the place in close quarters on sites with poor access to sanitation facilities. This will set back green energy a year at the very minimum.
Lower pollution energies only have a higher unit cost due to insane subsidies that oil/gas/coal receive. Now is a great time to ramp up cleaner technologies since people are going to be looking for jobs anyways once this ends.
Much better to advance technology when we are fixing our economy versus propping up old, unhealthy means.
Now is the worst time. Millions are losing their jobs, the last thing we need is to promote more expensive energy. A steady supply of energy right now is critical to literally keeping the lights on. Imagine our current situation but with more expensive energy costs and an unreliable supply. Like it our not, oil is critical to our survival right now. Cheap, plentiful energy is also going to be essential to driving the recovery. It’s also a strategic necessity.
Even without direct funding from Congress, the executive branch has pretty wide discretion for filling the reserve, mostly by accepting royalties-in-kind from producers on Federal land or offshore.
Basically, they can accept oil into the reserve instead of cash payments owed. There's also quite a bit of leeway for borrowing and lending oil as needed, as well as ways to lease unused storage capacity.
And the overall capacity is rate limited such that it takes almost half a year to fill/drain accessible reserves, so it's not like we could just purchases $3 billion in oil tomorrow and instantly put it there. It might store 35-40 days of US needs, but it takes 140-180 days to fill and/or access it. Which makes royalty based purchasing over time align more with ability to accept delivery.
So just because Congress removed that $3 billion, doesn't mean it's not getting filled.
It shouldn’t be filled because it’s useless and nothing but a political pork barrel. It will never be emptied during an emergency because politicians won’t agree on it.
We have emergency supplies, they are in the ground or in shale. The US is the largest producer of oil, low prices means more of it stays in the ground waiting for higher prices.
False. The US has made releases from the SPR in the past to stabilize oil prices. Such releases were made in 2005, 2006, and 2008 to stabilize prices when production was disrupted due to hurricane damage (either directly or due to shipping disruption).
6 months ago, you could have made the same argument about medical PPE - it costs billions of dollars and "we can always make a tremendous amount more".
Take the case of the SPR drawn downs after hurricane Katrina. Most of the disruption there was that the ports needed to get the oil on shore were damaged. More drilling wouldn't have fixed that in the short or long term - we just needed to repair the ports. The SPR was able to cover that and minimize the economic shocks of a fairly short term problem.
That dislocation was temporary, and prices did what they are supposed to do, they spiked to better allocate limited supplies and spur more rapid redevelopment.
The strategic oil supplies releases were done to lower prices for summer drivers to prevent damage to Bushes popularity rating.
The damage in that case is real though. People and businesses are impacted by price shocks and preventing them is an important thing for the government to do. As for the pricing signal, it's not like the businesses in question would just leave their pipelines broken, they're bleeding money from not being able to sell.
Certainly blocking pricing mechanisms without any additional government source of supply (I'm looking at you, preventing scalping during disasters) is potentially harmful, but I don't see the harm when they government can step in to meet demand.
There isn’t any damage to businesses. Higher pricing is how markets work out supplies limits, and prices determine what businesses should do.
On the face, lower oil prices is throwing millions out of work and “damaging” energy companies. But in reality it’s a huge boon for the economy. Outside of the energy businesses we are all energy consuming and cheaper energy makes us all more prosperous. The “damage” to energy companies and their employees is the wise reallocation if investment and labor into industries that now have more value and demand. The “damage” can also be temporary, when prices increase investment and jobs will return.
Jobs aren't just some fungible assets that come back for free when they're lost. A drop in the price of oil can also damage oil's substitutes, especially if the shock is expected to be long term.
>It will never be emptied during an emergency because politicians won’t agree on it.
This rests on speculation about future choices treated as if it were a fact, which is then used to make an absolutist, fatalistic decree.
And all the while the opposite is often true. If a decision is widely believed to benefit the American people, emergencies are excellent catalysts to motivate bipartisan compromise.
Even if you think politicians will make wise decisions with it, it’s not useful or necessary. We have hundreds of times more oil in the ground waiting for higher prices, no need to spend taxpayer money to force prices higher just to pump some into another hole.
While it is not necessary to have more than a cache because of domestic shale oil, forcing an average price would be good because the market is too volatile to support large investment.
It is critical to understand that shale/tar sands oil is very expensive in terms of fugitive emissions, far more than traditional deep wells. An emissions tax is needed to capture this externalized cost. A more stable oil price and greenhouse emissions taxation would encourage better fracking engineering to reduce emissions, as well as reducing pointless consumption.
That’s ridiculous, that volatile market has supported trillions in investment over the years. The market knows better than politicians and right now it’s keeping our massive supplies of oil in the ground until they are more valuable.
They are going bankrupt. A boom bust cycle is not the most efficient way to operate, and lots of marginal value taps with poor engineering and amateur boom operators leads to massive fugitive emissions. Your investment timeline is myopic.
It is literally the most efficient way to operate. Very quickly massive resources of investment and labor are redirected into areas that are much more valuable in a low energy cost world. Keeping zombie companies operating for no value is damaging to the economy.
It's not just the best time to build reserves; there's so much oil out there that prices dipped to negative values in some spots (yes, they would pay you to just come and collect the oil; if only you could). Oil is energy, this is similar to the occasional negative electrical energy prices in renewables-rich countries like Germany.
It's the opposite: now is the best time to scale down oil extraction, like we know has to be done to avoid climate catastrophe. In other times the demand wouldn't affect production as much.
“This is the perfect time to top it up: prices are low and we’re engaged militarily in the Middle East. For once, Russia’s loss is our gain,” said Scott Nations, chief investment officer of NationsShares.” [0]
How would Russia’s loss, “For once”, be our gain? Considering the rival interests of Russia and the United States, it would seem that Russia’s loss is usually our gain. What am I missing here?
I actually share your confusion but If I had to guess, Nations is thinking about the oil market specifically, where both US and Russia are exporters and would usually both benefit from high prices.
>> “Making some of the SPR’s storage capacity available to industry, without purchasing the oil, provides this immediate benefit to the industry and its hard-working employees”
The government is not buying any oil. The SPR is being opened up for storage so expensive producers can hold onto supply until prices recover.
The oil is from US producers, when they sell that oil out it won't be for $25/barrel when most of that oil will be from fracked wells costing $50+/dollars a barrel to operate [1].
"The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that in 2019, about 2.81 billion barrels (or 7.7 million barrels per day) of crude oil were produced directly from tight oil resources in the United States. This was equal to about 63% of total U.S. crude oil production in 2019." [0]
This would be the time to buying. I remember when it was 100+ dollars people were saying it will never go less than 100. Then when it was at 40 it will never go to a 100. Then it went to 100 in 2014. It's like people just don't look at history.
When I was attending Colorado School of Mines (~1999) conventional wisdom held that the maximum price should hover around $80 a barrel, since alternatives for industrial applications start becoming competitive beyond that point.
Keep in mind that oil can degrade while in storage, and degrade the storage itself. Taxation complicates the picture for commercial interests.
All things considered, the world probably has more above ground storage than it needs, and what exists is already full. From the perspective of at least one major oil company that I know of, this was already the case a decade ago.
Go Orediggers! Mines '00 here, I was across the street in Brown Building though (CivEng).
During the last round of oil shocks ('07-'08) I remember a lot being made about the inelasticity of demand for oil, and how that made prices so volatile. I'm sure that it's still very inelastic, but now that there are non-petroleum transportation alternatives (mass-produced EVs) I'm curious to see what future oil shocks will look like, and whether we'll reduce some of that storage as price volatility goes away.
Over 10 years people can buy less gas cars and more electric cars. But over a month, the car in your garage is either gas or electric. Not that many individual things that can do both. Maybe some power plants, where say neither coal nor oil generators are at 100% capacity...
To provide some context, the US uses about 20m barrels of oil per day. We have about 35 days worth of oil reserves. It seems if there was some kind of extended emergency where we could not produce oil, 772m barrels would be wholly inadequate.
they arent going to distribute the oil to civilians so they can drive to the beach or buy groceries, this oil would go directly to military operations that would then establish more long term oil production
As we should be learning right now with medical supplies, the point of these reserves is not primarily to keep us at normal levels in the face of long-term supply disruption (which is nearly impossible for most things at scale), but to be able to cover the time we need 3x normal capacity to give us 10 days to plan a sustainable response.
From some time in the 1950s or early 1960s to a few years ago, the US consumed more oil than it produced. I am going to guess that for more than half of that time, it produced less than half of the oil it consumed.
Then US companies figured out how to profit from extracting from shale oil deposits (by fracking).
Right, now look at where "from" and "to" are in my sentence.
During and for years after WWII, the US was a major net exporter of oil, which is why I felt the need to specify the approximate start (some time in the 1950s or early 1960s) of the US's dependence on imported oil.
The strategic oil reserve doesn’t protect us from being a net oil importer. It’s always going to be a tiny fraction of 1% of our existing supplies, and a small percentage of our annual consumption.
It literally does nothing but subsidize US oil producers and mildly reduce price spikes for limited periods.
The idea, generally speaking, isn't to provide all the country's oil for a period of a time. In fact, there's only pumping capacity to remove about 5m barrels/day from the reserve.
The point of the reserve is to be used with smaller withdrawals to stabilize the system over time or provide a buffer in case of short term disruption.
Interestingly, would like to know how manny barrels we are using currently with almost a complete lockdown ? I am just 1 anecdote but I have only driven my car twice in past 2 weeks and total of less than 15 miles. In general, I drive 20 miles per day on an average.
I'd imagine that in such a situation, a lot of things would be shut down - there's a good chance it'd last a little more than 35 days when use is lower.
And North American production will ramp up as quickly as possible. We've seen very expensive oil in the last decade which has made a variety of alternative extraction methods economical. Not entirely sure how a situation could arise where oil production is impossible.
Exactly. For example, right now we're operating at somewhere around 25% less transit than normal [1] and that's without even specifically targeting reducing oil consumption. In an oil emergency situation we could probably get to 30-40% reduction pretty quickly.
I hate headlines like this. The oil isn't "hidden": the strategic petroleum reserve is a completely up front and public thing. There's no hiding going on. That word in the headline is just clickbait.
If some great catastrophe someday flattens our civilization, these reserves (and others of the sort, globally) will probably be the only oil sources accessible to civilization as it tries to rebuild. They may even be enough - we use oil at an absurd rate now, but for most of our technological development (excepting perhaps the world wars) I'd imagine it was much less.
For some reason, though, the oil industry is one of the most technologically advanced sectors that exist, and employs some dominating fraction of all PhDs in geology and related fields. Even though they’re just “pumping oil from holes in the ground.” I guess they just really like their toys. :)
Most easily accessible oil resources are long gone. What we could get to if we were reduced to 1800s technology is extremely limited.
I am sure an alien race visiting the earth in 2020 would be astonished to see how frenzied human beings are in digging up meteors (the ONLY source of gold outside the Earth's core) but worst of all, why are these humans digging up liquids in Saudi Arabia and transporting them halfway around the world only to bury them in Louisiana?
Does the salt of the actual cavern dissolve in the oil? And does that effect the quality?
Are these reserves easy military targets? It would seem causing an explosion in one of these would be catastrophic. I can see why this wouldn't be, but I'd like to leave this question as is to promote (fun) discussion.
The village I was born in sits on caverns like than which are used to store year worth of gas supply for whole country. Back in 70s one of the tower blow up resulting in huge huge gas burner/candle (100 meters tall). No damage or lives were lost but it took army two weeks to handle it (blew it by jet engine). This fire actually happened on my grandma backyard, but no evacuation was needed. In case oil behave the same like gas I would say it is relatively safe.
Water is a polar solvent which is why it can dissolve polar molecules like salts. Gasoline is a nonpolar solvent so the worst you'd get is particulate matter coming from the walls, which can be physically filtered out - crude oil has to be refined to remove those kinds of impurities already so the infrastructure is ready to go.
It's a salt dome underground. You could drop bombs on it for months and not crack the dome.
They drilled into a salt dome in Mississippi, placed and detonated a nuclear bomb into it to see "what if". They didn't destroy the dome. It created a nice little pocket of highly radioactive salt that self-capped with melt material. The cavity got bigger, but the salt dome is still intact.
That kind of durability is what makes these kinds of structures perfect for geological storage.
The salt does not dissolve into the oil, it contains it like a glass contains water.
Salt caverns are very interesting for storing all kinds of oil / hydrocarbons / chemicals. Most fluids found naturally in the ground (oil, natural gas, groundwater) are stored in porous rock. Rocks like sandstone seem quite solid on a human scale, but do have microscopic voids which are filled with whatever kind of liquid/gas in their natural state. We drill into this rock and the liquid/gas slowly moves through the pores of the rock and come up the well. After the liquid/gas is removed, the rock still remains, there's not like a giant cavern you could stand in remaining underground...it's just still solid sandstone.
Sometimes we can re-use these sandstone/limestone reservoirs after extracting the oil from them. Natural gas storage facilities sometimes set up shop and pump surge/excess natural gas into the empty oil fields in the off season (summer for northern states) and then extract it again in the high season (winter for northern states to heat homes). However, due to these being natural formations, sometimes there are discontinuities in the boundary layers of impermeable rock so that some of the gas leaks out of the reservoir over time. The storage facility says basically "Anyone who can deliver natural gas to this pipeline may store their natural gas with us. We will mix it into the formation with everyone else's gas, and then pump it out later. For every 1000ft^3 you give us, we will give you 900ft^3 back, and charge you $4 for the privilege."
Salt caverns are very different! They're not porous. underground there can be immense - up to 2 miles long by 2.5 miles wide, by 1800 feet in depth. Sometimes miners work the salt face like coal mines, but because salt is soluble in water, sometimes it is mined by drilling a small hole into it, then pumping water through the hole and bringing saltwater back up (typically this is the method that chemical plants such as the one in Freeport, TX use to obtain salt/chlorine to make PVC/etc).
After washing out a lot of salt using water, there is left an enormous void - a room large enough to park many vehicles. It takes a lot of engineering to make sure you washed out the cavern into a shape that is structurally sound. If geologists determine that the cavern is structurally sound, then they can try filling it with hydrocarbons.
Unlike sandstone/limestone formations, salt caverns rarely leak much product out of storage, but the salt is rarely 100% pure (92-98% is common) so some of the other minerals can dissolve into the stored product and needs to be removed...but typically the cost of cleaning the stored product is minimal compared to its value.
To answer your military question: Yes and no. Yes, all storage facilities of strategic value are mapped by all world powers and targeted in a WW3 scenario. But you wouldn't generally try to cause an explosion inside one. In fact, a stuxnet-style attack would be somewhat unlikely to be able to, as there's generally no oxygen/air inside the storage caverns. The oil is removed by pumping water below it.
A more likely attack would be a conventional or nuclear explosion above ground, knocking out the equipment/pipes needed to extract the oil from the cavern.
Other targets of similar or even greater value would include any locations where multiple strategic oil pipelines cross eachother and exchange material flows (e.g. Hattiesburg, MS), or where the refining takes place (e.g. Houston, TX). Even just one pipeline not working unexpectedly can cause noticeable fuel disruptions/shortages, such as when Colonial Pipeline had some accidents in 2016, parts of New England area faced fuel shortages.
Also, we have plenty of above-ground oil storage (in typical tanks) in addition to underground storage. However, the strategic petroleum reserves (800 million barrels) are truly massive and dwarf the entire private industry storage in USA (above and belowground combine to 650 million barrels).
I bet you know about that salt cavern that collapsed at Lake Peigneur[1]. There should be a documentary on youtube where you can see the footage, including a really big boat going "phoomph" into the whirlpool created by the bayou water filling in the cavern. Edit: here's one[2]
You're right that it's rock salt, and while some of it is mined as coal/metal ore is mined, the salt can also be extracted by gently washing it out with water, as is done near Freeport, TX. The oil doesn't do that because while salt dissolves readily into water, it does not dissolve in oil.
The 2018 Trump tax reform authorized selling 30% of the reserve in order to shrink the federal deficit. They only sold off 10% before halting, due to a glut depressing US energy industry.
I think the more important take away is the damage of globalism to our ability to manufacture things ourselves. Sure, having a stockpile of masks is beneficial, but having the infrastructure and supply chain continually setup to manufacture them would go a lot further. This is especially true of medicine.
Instead we have irresponsible politicians letting business chase slave labor, and only invoking "national security" when it comes to deteriorating rights or buying ever more machines of war.
We have the national strategic stockpile for masks in the US. The problem is that neither party likes funding masks because voters hate it. It's like infrastructure spending. Neither party wants to do it, it doesn't buy enough votes.
Thanks for link. However, the link is one person in Colorado complaining that the state is not getting enough machines. (There are not enough machines period, even thought he US, per-virus had the largest stockpile in the world).
The problem here is not one of having the mechanism, it's underestimating how many would be needed in a massive outbreak.
(the link was shared more in hope people would read it and find it interesting - it's obvious no reasonable emergency stock could have been prepared for the situation we're in)
I have my doubts about if the mask itself really expires. It sounds like one of those things they stamp an expiration on because they have to. Blown polypropylene will probably outlast the heat death of the universe.
The elastic does breaks down alarmingly quickly (I wonder if this is intentional) -- I have a box of N95 masks I bought a couple of years ago when doing some drywall work and the elastic has utterly failed.
Meanwhile the elastic in my underwear seems to last forever! I guess I know how I can fix those masks ...
Moderators, the title here is inappropriate and arguably linkbait. The article itself does not claim that the US strategic petroleum reserve is "hidden". The article's title, "What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?" would be better.
Right, we changed it a while ago. The submitted title was "The US has 727 million barrels of oil hidden in underground salt caverns". Submitters: it breaks the site guidelines to do that, and we eventually take submission privileges away from such accounts. There's plenty of explanation for anyone who wants more:
I wouldn't call it "hidden", it's public knowledge. It needs to be filled however because oil is so cheap.
And for the keyboard nay-sayers that are typing on a keyboard made of ABS, walking their down on a nylon leash, holding their iPhone in a TPU case, drinking from a polycarbonate reusable water bottle, wondering how we're going to refine steel for wind turbines, oil is an incredible useful substance.
Let's learn from the N95 mask shortage. It's incredibly important to have national stockpiles to decouple ourselves from the events in the world (like the one happening now).
Please don't post flamebait to HN. Your comment turned the thread into a generic (I really want to say stupid) flamewar, which got more tedious and nastier as it went along, as such things predictably do.
Worse, it sat at the top of the entire page, sucking oxygen away from everything else, because indignation routinely attracts upvotes. HN readers belong to the same species as Jerry Springer attendees. I've flagged it and marked it off topic now.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Not sure, I wondered if the comic actually was also trying to show the growth of "necessities" over time. Like a car at first was a luxury and not a necessity. A phone today might be a necessity. And the last strip doesn't even bring up necessities, it makes a case of the difficulty of fighting the system you complain about when being in it, which to me is also a point about necessities.
Like one could argue society makes it harder and harder for you to be ethical as time goes on. Making the path of resistance ever so harder and requiring more risk from you. And this can be used as a tool later to justify societies unethical choices. Like, hey, if you can't even be ethical yourself, why do you expect society to be and say we should?
That comic is a terrible Reductio ad absurdum. The first one is a fair point – Apple products are not a necessity. Therefore if you think the company behind them is behaving unethically, don't buy their products in order to not support their activities.
1. The validity of the argument isn't affected by whether one is a hypocrite. If Apple is indeed behaving unethically, it's still behaving unethically even if I own an iPhone. If Apple isn't behaving unethically, then you should be able to argue that on grounds other than "you bought an iPhone." The poster in this case made specific, refutable claims - that Apple dodges taxes and can't pay decent wages to their Chinese factory workers. A legitimate counterargument is that they don't in fact dodge taxes or do in fact pay decent wages (or perhaps that their current behavior is okay), not an attack on the person making the argument.
2. Apple products are not a necessity, but in the current era, a smartphone is very close to a necessity (yes, there are people who steadfastly avoid them, and there are also people who live in the forest, that's not what "necessity" means). And there are relatively few options for good smartphones, none of which come from morally blameless companies. (Personally, I find security valuable, and Apple has the best track record of producing phones with long-term security support, which means you can buy fewer Apple products than anything else.) It might be hypocritical to buy a product from company X while steadfastly believing that company X is behaving unethically, but it's hardly a sign that you don't in fact believe that company X behaves unethically. You might simply have weight the alternatives and decided that buying from company X is the best of several bad options.
1. I think the issue is that "unethically" is a very subjective standard. The hypocrisy does not invalidate the argument, it merely brings into question whether this is an "accurate" moral judgement if it is not serious enough to warrant a (relatively easy) change in behavior from the person espousing it. In other words: morality is very inherently subjective, so hypocrisy does matter. It's not about convincing me that something is happening (like sweatshops). Facts are easy. The problem is convincing me that the thing that is happening is bad. And you're not going to do that if you can't put your money where your mouth is. If you're a hypocrite about issues of morality, you're either preaching to the choir, or you're not going to convince anyone.
2. If I truly believed Apple and every other smartphone manufacturer was causing human suffering to produce their smartphones, my own morality would dictate that my "need" for a smartphone still does not justify the purchase of one. It's a null point to me though, because A. I don't actually believe that Apple's manufacturing practices are "wrong", and B. I know plenty of successful people that get by without smartphones in the current era.
Are the working standards to a level you would feel comfortable working in? Would you personally be okay putting together smartphone products and/or pulling rare metals out of the ground?
The alternative to a smart phone is a feature phone made in a similar factory, and the alternative to that is a landline, also made in a similar factory, and the alternative to all that is maybe a laptop with VoIP, also made in a similar factory... It's exploitation all the way down.
When the markets only way to offer prosperity to some is to exploit and shaft others, while maintaining the position of elite classes, there is a problem.
That doesn't answer the question at all. It sounds like you are saying you wouldn't work in those conditions. Why? Because the conditions are poor. Poor conditions with little alternatives... Hmm, one could say such situations are ripe for exploitation.
Just because the alternative is potential death, it does not excuse exploitative practices.
I wouldn't work in a plethora of roles. In fact, the vast majority of "jobs" that have existed in the history of humanity I would prefer not to do.
That doesn't mean anyone doing them is being "exploited". And if that is your definition of exploitation, you've reduced the word to be effectively meaningless.
> I wouldn't work in a plethora of roles. In fact, the vast majority of "jobs" that have existed in the history of humanity I would prefer not to do.
Examples and why would you prefer not to do them? Are they legally allowed in your country anymore? Is there a reason for that? Perhaps because they are now considered exploitative?
> That doesn't mean anyone doing them is being "exploited". And if that is your definition of exploitation, you've reduced the word to be effectively meaningless.
It sounds to me like you don't even have "exploitation" in your vocabulary, as your bar is so low, you wouldn't consider anything exploitative.
Literally multi-nationals exploit labor law differences to extract cost savings, and obfuscated supply chains to launder the blood off the raw materials they put into products. This is exploitative. Perhaps you should just come to terms with the fact that you are OK with it.
Hypocrisy is relevant (even if bringing it up is offensive) to whether an opinion is genuine when a person fails to solve a personal problem according to what they claim they believe.
It's not relevant when the problem is collective.
Your opinion (2) doesn't make any sense to me, because if you did grant that the manufacture of all smartphones involves massive human suffering, how could manufacturing of everything else not?
> For example, I'm not going to listen to your arguments about climate change if you aren't actively curbing your red meat consumption.
As it happens, I've considered becoming vegetarian but I'm literally allergic to nuts, and it's hard to have a balanced diet with enough protein if nuts aren't an option. The validity of an argument is even less affected by whether you think the arguer is a hypocrite.
Also, would you listen to my argument about how individual red meat consumption is a drop in the bucket of climate change and isn't really worth focusing on?
Is soy included in your nut allergy? I'm vegan and don't eat many nuts, although most of my protein comes from soy products. I was vegetarian for a while and used whole milk, eggs, and cheese for protein. Although I believe in the rights of living creatures so I couldn't do the dairy/eggs route any more.
There are plenty of foods that will give you enough protein, leafy greens like kale, beans, and rice are a staple of any stir fry/curry and are complete meals nutritionally.
fwiw, one of the things i love about my diet that was really hard to get used to was the difference of caloric density of vegetables vs animal products. I am constantly full and sometimes just have a hard time stuffing my face with enough food. I also am an amateur athlete so my caloric needs are probably really different than most people on this site.
>Also, would you listen to my argument about how individual red meat consumption is a drop in the bucket of climate change and isn't really worth focusing on?
I don't believe we're going to be able to change big business if we don't have the gumption to change our day to day lives. We need to live it in order to make real change, and factory farming, specifically of red meat, is the highest on the list for personal consumption. I also believe we've advanced as a society to not have to rely on killing living beings or manipulating their reproductives cycles for our benefit.
edit: I don't understand the downvotes here. I am literally informing someone about MY diet. Can you please add a response if you choose to downvote this post.
Many problems are not suitable to be addressed by individual’s consumption choices. For instance, I think governments and international trade organizations should make sure there is no slavery involved in producing goods - it should simply not be legal to sell something if it was produced by slave or child labor. I would ask you to judge me on the efforts I make to influence politicians in this direction, rather than on whether or not I have done extensive research on the sourcing of minerals of every smart phone brand. The latter simply does not scale.
Methane looks scary, but it’s half-life is short and we have a boatload in the atmosphere already. As such grass fed cows are a complete non issue. What’s meaningful long term is how much carbon we are digging up.
AFAIK factory farming does not use grass fed cows. I've heard the grass fed arguments, but I just don't see that happening any time soon at the current red meat consumption scale if ever.
You can just directly buy grass fed cows from farmers. It’s not what you’re going to eat at a fast food joint, but avoiding fast food etc is different than going vegetarian.
My personal red meat consumption works just fine at scale, so that’s not an issue. Just compare efficiency of grass fed vs factory farms and lower your consumption to compensate. That said my consumption is well below average as I haven’t eaten meat this week which is fairly common.
>In other words, you don't listen to the likely majority of scientists?
I'm all ears, what do you mean here? You're talking about people who have devoted their lives to learning and explaining the world around us and not an armchair enthusiast worried about internet points?
>You're confusing rationality with integrity.
I really don't think I am, can you explain what you mean in more detail?
What is there to explain? My point is that it's very likely that the majority of scientists continue to happily eat meat, yet you've said you don't listen to such people.
>I really don't think I am, can you explain what you mean in more detail?
A person's credibility is only relevant if their personal experience is actually relevant to the soundness of their argument.
Sure, but life is busy. If you don't care enough about your beliefs to bother doing anything for them, why should those of us that don't necessarily even hold them give a shit?
It's okay for you to dismiss arguments, but if you're going to make counterarguments, clearly life isn't that busy.
(But to the actual point - it's hard to infer whether someone "cares enough" about their beliefs. I personally care about Apple's labor practices; I also care a lot about Google's security practices, which are also contributing to serious human rights violations in China. I'm allowed to care about more than one thing at once.)
I think I mixed up things in my head, sorry - I don't think there's a claim of that exploit being used in China in particular. (I was probably confusing it with https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-d... / https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/31/china-google-iphone-uyghur... , which is about iOS, in fact - but IMO there's a big difference between new bugs being discovered and "CVE-2019-2215 permits attackers to fully compromise a device with only untrusted app access or a browser renderer exploit and despite the patch being available in the upstream Linux kernel, it was left unpatched in Android devices for almost 2 years." I don't think either Apple or Google is doing an adequate job here at all, but Apple still seems to be a bit better, between the options.)
Where are the posts by all those people without those phones they're boycotting?
His point is the first part ... i don't believe the reservoir of oil is the issue, but the lack of progress towards a greener future. We have no other choice, and little control over government, beyond peaceful criticisms.
So let it be.
Don't pick and choose, own up. Im sure there’s a latin phrase to what you do, too, but were not here to squabble! Not during these times ..
> The first one is a fair point – Apple products are not a necessity
Apple products are not a necessity but cell phones pretty much are today. And nearly all phones are made in countries with looser labor and environmental laws than we'd accept in Western nations.
A minority of rich can extract the planets resources.
The species does not have to abide that minorities ideological demands literally.
Avoiding figurative harm of the self righteous is walking the path authoritarianism.
A big number in a bank DB is not irrefutable proof of value to the species.
Westerners and the monied are outnumbered. Environmental collapse from chewing up resources for disposable shit that rots, doesn’t last for the next generation, does not have to be tolerated.
Maybe if we just focused on making sure our biological similarities are cared for as a society, we’d have more time to wank our customized imaginings of our individual importance in private, but otherwise be unable to achieve political leverage to drive us off a cliff, leaving others to stably consider their ideas.
But no... we have to bend over to pleasure the grifter class.
Accusing people of “virtue signaling” tends to be just another form of signaling.
“There’s a problem, it matters, but I don’t personally have the fix handy” is not an unreasonable position. It’s like a non-chef saying “this food is bad”; that they can’t cook isn’t relevant to that fact.
Yeah, the post you're responding to feels like a huge internet trend where people are absolutely desperate to grasp at straws to make complete strangers look like stupid hypocrites and rely on projections to do so.
I'm not sure if people are more filled with angst because they're cooped up at home, but it seems to border on a mental disorder if you're sitting behind your keyboard all day screaming at people who are "hypocrites" because they both don't like oil being drilled, and also live in a society where they use some oil.
I saw a video a few months ago mocking "anti police protesters asking for the police to help them when they were being attacked". And the premise seemed to be "haha, if you hate police so much (they don't), isnt it ironic that you need their help?" No, not really. They pay the police's salary though taxes. Its not like them protesting takes that funding away. Apparently its hypocritical to not mindlessly agree with everything police do if you will ever need the police to help you. Same shit here, just endless angst and hate for stranger based on made up projections. Why? What is the use for this?
Oil is useful. I get it. How much oil is burned in comparison to oil used in manufacturing? When we typically talk about eliminating oil we are talking about not burning it anymore.
I'm 100% for filling up and even drastically expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I'm also for ending fossil fuels (we can synthesize plastics without fossil fuels) and keeping as much fossil fuel as possible underground. The Strategic Reserve's whole purpose is to sit underground for the most part, so it's compatible with an anti-fossil-fuel perspective.
One way a massive Reserve could help fight fossil fuel production is because it devalues arguments that we need to expand drilling permits. With a big enough reserve, we can reduce permits on federal lands to just about nothing with plenty of time to drill them in case of an emergency like a war or something.
Indeed it is useful. It's usefulness was never in debate(it is it's ability to pollute that's the problem) but most of the things you named has a substitute made from other materials exist.
Can entire supply chains switch over that quickly? I would imagine that if something catastrophic were to occur and supply chains had to switch, we would need some buffer.
The US has nearly a trillion barrels worth of oil in the ground, but we should bail out oil producers by trying to fill a different hole with less than a billion barrels of oil at government expense?
I haven't seen many people that say oil isn't useful. It's the burning of this valuable substance that is the problem when it could be used for all these things you list.
