Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.
  • kalkulat@lemmy.world
    10·
    11 months ago

    Because you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time … and they’ve been at it for a very long time.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
    81·
    11 months ago

    They don’t need to invest in new production any more, so that capital investment money is now pure profit.

  • alienghic@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    I blame the young earth creationist christians who think that humans are incapable of destroying gods creation, and that the increasing planetary instability means that god will return and put them in charge any day now.

      • alienghic@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        There’s some weird links between american christianity and oil. At the very least a bunch of the people who got rich off of oil also tended to be devout christians, and used their money to support evangelizing christianity and oil dominance.

        There’s a number of different reviews for “Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America”

        This is an especially detailed one. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kim-phillips-fein-anointed-oil/

        I found the book and it’s reviews after noticing just how biased toward the republicans the owners of the oil companies tended to be. Other large businesses tend to play both sides in politics, but the owners of the oil companies really seem to be really into the traditional gender hierarchies.

  • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    We see a bunch of things happening. First of all the West attacked and keeps attacking Russias oil production and exports with sanctions, due to Russias invasion of Ukraine. That means we actually have one of the biggest oil producers and exporters being taken out of the game. Something similar happened with Venezuela and Iran previously. So we actually see declines, just not choose by the countries themself, but mainly by the US, to keep out competition. At the same time 2023 oil consumption is 1.7% above 2019 oil consumption. The pandemic had a massiv effect on the industry and a lot of production is being restarted. However we also see EVs starting to have an impact. There are also a lot of other pushes mainly by net oil importers to reduce oil consumption. This seems to start to actually hurt the industry.

    If I had to guess, we probably see the next reduction in oil production in the Middle East. Not due to the governments wanting to produce less oil, but due to a war in the region.

  • PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world
    31·
    11 months ago

    Andres Malm suggests in his book “Fossil Capital” that part of the reason that fossil fuels (stocks of energy) are so profitable is that you can pick and choose when to extract and then again when to release the energy stored in them, which will always be more profitable than, for instance, wind and solar (flows of energy) because you can manipulate production to prevent over supply, and choose when to release energy instead of waiting for the energy to be available in the flow. The higher capability to profit means that they will remain more profitable than renewables long after any other sort of calculation other than “profitability” would favor the renewables (cost to produce, damage to the environment, ability to satisfy energy demand).

    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
      13·
      11 months ago

      It’s way more than cars. Plastics, chemicals, energy, shipping, fertilizers, pesticides, even food additives can trace their ingredients to oil and gas. We’ve structured our whole society around oil since World War I, and getting out of it isn’t going to be easy.

      • MrMakabar@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        A lot of it, is due to having waste products from refining crude oil, which could be turned into something usefull. So when you transition away from combustion engine cars, you increase the costs of other oil based products.

      • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
        43·
        11 months ago

        Doing it as fast as possible would crash the world economy because everything is setup up for oil. So it seems obvious what needs to happen, it’s a different story when you personally are now homeless and you just want a roof and food. We can do a lot better than we are though

        • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
          3·
          11 months ago

          The alternative, parts of the world will be uninhabitable. Always gotta think about the economy… no matter how many people this is going to kill, or how much biodiversity we lose along the way.

          Is there any point of loss where we will say the economy isn’t important anymore, or do we have to be experiencing the loss already?

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
      7·
      11 months ago

      …or maybe massive lobbying, subsidies, corruption and fear mongering? No, that can’t be it. A trillion dollar industry would never do unethical things to cling to their power.