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There is something I really like in this Ygeslias article. Whatever is causing more partisan politics it’s not the economy. We’ve done well the past few years.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-obama-and-trump-and-biden-beat
Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky but he yelled at the Fed for being too hawkish.
I like how he led with the shale Revolution. I’ve been saying this for years. Tech gets all the fan fare but if Tech was the Jordan of the economy American energy independence over this time frame was the Scottie Pippen in creating wealth for America. I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus moat building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs versus companies having high margins. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant our trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red; people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue. Someday I should write a long article on this because I have not seen anyone write about it. But the split in voting patterns makes a lot of sense based on the economics of their business. It would even make sense to have different tax regimes for these businesses but would be impossibly hard to execute. As a driver of political views it seems as powerful as male-female splits which seems a lot more talked about.
I think maga and the left like to cite American wealth not making it to the middle class etc. But honestly this much wealth creation can’t just be consumed by the 1% it pretty much has to flow to others. Perhaps, the middle class isn’t doing as well as we want them to be doing but the counter factual (Europe) would be poorer than what we got.
The GDP numbers are more pronounced because we calculate things in currencies and the cited figures were when the dollar was weak. The gap has definitely shifted in favor of the US but I do think this overstates the change.
The Tea Party seems underrated to me. They put a halt to more government spending. Less fiscal policy meant the fed could keep rates lower which basically crowded-in private investment in tech and shale and a host of things with cheap money. The current situation is the opposite of this where we increased federal spending from about 20.5% last decade to 24% now. And that’s caused a massive change in rates to get inflation close to target.
Culture Wars seem to have little to do with economic mismanagement by either side. I think the right is correct that the fall of small towns is bad but I think that largely came from economic forces (like productivity) gains that couldn’t be prevented. And there small towns have also been hurt by the people (probably like myself) who would be logical local elites moving away.
As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
Shale was a major mistake by the US. Shale oil is short lived compared to conventional oil with high decline rates and is expensive to extract. The shale boom will not be a long term solution. Shale caused a 10-20 year boom which will be followed by a decline. Meanwhile, the US is missing valuable years transitioning away from fossil fuels. The world is building public transit and high speed rail at record rates, the US is investing in short term shale oil as its long term energy solution. Cheap natural gas has allowed for construction of energy inefficient buildings and a lack of investment in efficient heating/cooling systems. The US is seriously lagging behind in walkable and bikeable cities due to cheap gas. Even when it comes to electric vehicles the US is somewhat behind
As for the energy grid, the US is lagging behind in nuclear with an older fleet of reactors than Europe and only 1 of 60 reactors planned for construction in the world are in the US. The US is lagging behind in renewables, and overall investments in the energy transition
The shale boom absolutely benefited the US. However, other parts of the world have ripped of a sizeable chunk of the bandaid regarding getting off fossil fuels.
The same entities that oppose shale also make nuclear expensive and hydro and everything. While there are some genuine green activists that would be happy with decarbonization, there are many more who use that as an excuse for the real goal of de-electrification.
As someone who considers themselves a green activist, de-electrification isn't really the goal per se.
The problem is that the cut-off date for a smooth, clean and orderly transition away from using fossil fuels is the far-off future of...1974. De-electrification isn't a goal anymore than having a car stop when it runs out of gas is a goal. There's no energy source that can take the place of petroleum and fossil fuels - nothing has the massive amounts of existing infrastructure, body of knowledge, energy density and EROEI to take their place, and the costs of retrofitting our society with the technology required to maintain current living standards with the far lower energy budget that renewables provide are so massive that it would not be possible from within the constraints of the current society.
Shale in particular is a really bad idea, because it has incredibly high depletion rates, lower EROEI than regular crude and causes substantial environmental damage. Those costs might not show up on a fracking company's balance sheet, but those consequences will show up elsewhere in society, in the form of less usable farmland, medical issues, water-pollution, etc. The main reason that shale looks good at the moment is the combination of unaccounted externalities, incredibly low interest rates/money-printing and a paucity of conventional light, sweet crude. This isn't a case of the environmentalists just wanting less electricity usage because civilisation is bad, but more along the lines of pointing out that eating the seed corn is actually a bad idea rather than a brand new strategy that older people were too dumb to see the benefits of, even if you have a new accounting system which claims that there's nothing wrong with eating said seed corn.
Is this a copypasta from a couple of years ago? The Fed has been raising rates for a while now.
The majority of the shale oil boom took place during that period - and even then there were a lot of problems.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/shales-bust-shows-basis-of-boom-debt-debt-and-debt/2020/07/22/0e6ed98c-cc41-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html
There's some good stuff in the article, but this chart alone was even worse than I thought it would be:
(chart should go here, not sure if it is being formatted correctly?)
This really does not look like a healthy, thriving and profitable energy sector to me. That said, I haven't found good data that reaches the current year - maybe the industry has managed to recover and start generating healthy profits, but I really don't think so.
/images/1689832993043623.webp
Your article is about how shale producers were in trouble when energy use (and thus oil prices) were way down due to COVID. Oil prices were rather significantly higher before, and now.
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I think it was an accurate descriptor when a lot of shale infrastructure was getting built, but yeah, weird if he’s talking about current development.
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Even if I took all of your post as sincere and true, I'd still be running into confusion as to why the environmental movement has caused nuclear to 10x in price, inflation adjusted. The confusion isn't, "why does this particular person dislike shale?" It is, "why does the general movement of people who dislike shale also dislike nuclear?"
You appear to have a specific view on shale that is far more specific and niche than 99.99% of people who oppose shale could ever express. I like shale because it is an avenue that circumvents the anti-energy caucus for now. I am in favor of all cheap energy, hydro, coal, oil, shale, etc. As long as it foils the anti-energy people, and keeps us advancing towards a day where energy is actually sustainable, I am good. The people who think they can force it via regulation are evil or naive. So called "green" energy is already overinvested, and mostly rubbish.
@Amadan
I was asked to volunteer mod/rate this post even though it was a reply to me from someone I was actively debating. I marked it as neutral, but this seems like unwanted behavior that could be ripe for abuse and I wanted to report it. (sorry for the ping anti dan)
Yeah, it's not ideal, and I want to fix it, we just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I am sort of entertained by it because it's a good way to tell if someone can separate a bad post from someone they're disagreeing with. Kind of tempted to make it more likely, not less likely.
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Actually @ZorbaTHut would be the one to ping. I don't think this is a big deal, personally - yeah, someone might occasionally get asked to volunteer-mod a post that was arguing with him, but even if you always chose "Yes, definitely bad!" you aren't the only one looking at it, and mods have final say, so there's not that much opportunity to game the system.
(fwiw, I think @anti_dan is being more hostile than necessary, with the thinly-veiled implication that you are being insincere and disingenuous, but I don't think it rises to the level of requiring a mod warning. This time.)
To be clear. I was not implying that, I was instead conveying that his viewpoint appears to be so rare in the general meatspace that it is hard to engage with unless he lays out a 10000 word manifesto explaining all his theories causes and effects, etc.
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For the record, I am being entirely sincere - and, to the best of my knowledge, true.
I don't believe the environmental movement has caused nuclear to inflate in price to such an absurd degree, but the position I take on nuclear is simple: show me the money. If it was possible to actually generate nuclear power sustainably and profitably, why hasn't anyone done it yet? How has the western environmentalist movement managed to trick every single government on the planet, including ones who are manifestly and directly opposed to them and the horse they rode in on? Too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power has been just a few years in the future for the entirety of my life, and it would be such a geopolitical game-changer that there's no way even the US government would ignore it. Can you honestly and earnestly say that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Ali Khamenei are all so terrified of the US environmental movement that they are turning down technology that would immediately and dramatically change the geopolitical balance of power in their favour and crush the petrodollar? The environmental movement cannot even get western governments to agree to slow down the rate of increase of fossil fuel consumption, but they have a total veto over this kind of technology across the entire world? I can't see any way to square this circle, when the answer "It just isn't economical" explains it perfectly.
Pollution and environmental damage is the unifying concern for the "general movement" as far as I can tell. If you believe that those sources of energy are only profitable because of unaccounted-for externalities, making them more expensive via regulation et al is an extremely sensible goal, and actually optimal in the long term.
This is an incredibly dangerous and short-sighted belief! How confident are you that those energy sources are not bridges to nowhere or have ultimate costs which leave us further behind? I'm extremely confident that shale in particular falls into this category - an illusion that looks worthwhile simply because the actual costs have been converted into externalities that aren't accounted for, on top of being in a financial system which distorts economic realities and conditions. I believe the rationalist community term for this concept is "deceptive local maxima" but I may have just imagined this.
Green energy is far from overinvested - hydro and geothermal in particular seem like fertile ground for future investment, but you're right that it is mostly rubbish. Renewable energy sources simply cannot provide the same amount of energy fossil fuels do, and the lifestyles they can sustainably and comfortably support are most definitely not the incredibly extravagant ones that people in first world societies currently live. But that doesn't mean they're overinvested when you view them in the proper context. To use a metaphor I've stolen from someone else, a parachute is a terrible investment. You lower the resale value the moment you get it out of the box, you're gonna have trouble using it more than once, and ultimately you're going to be losing money on the purchase. But if you're aware that you're going to be pushed out of a plane at high altitude tomorrow morning, the parachute looks like a much smarter purchase than some FAANG shares.
I disagree with a lot of what you've said, but I appreciate you saying it here and explaining your stance clearly. I see you're kind of getting dogpiled by people who disagree, but I've learned a bit about green activist viewpoints from all your interactions here. Thank you.
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For what it’s worth, nuclear does push the border of too-cheap-to-meter. The cost per megawatt is pretty low, and the high cost of shutdown and spinup makes operators want to keep it running. So they tend to bid it pretty low in energy markets, roughly comparable to renewable sources. Certainly much lower than combined-cycle natural gas.
I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong on this front. Can you show me the nuclear power system that can run sustainably and profitably without government subsidies? As far as I can tell this doesn't exist anywhere on Earth, and the French nuclear system is currently being nationalised by the government due to the massive amounts of debt they had to take on (for what it's worth, I think that if a power generating system is taking on copious amounts of unsustainable debt to the point it requires nationalisation, it probably isn't very profitable).
I'd actually go so far as to say that in 2023, there are no non-fossil fuel power systems that can be run sustainably without government subsidies. And even then, governments are playing a global game where the flow of fossil fuels are tied to geopolitics.
I was working in China during the Great Solar Adoption. Endless fields of them, blanketing dozens upon dozens of factories. What they don't tell you is that photovoltaics are incredibly toxic to handle, dispose of, and manufacture, they require regular cleaning before the efficiency generation drops precipitously, they don't last anywhere near what they're supposed to and produce incredible amounts of dangerous e-waste. They were only adopted because of incredibly generous government tax benefits and subsidies, as well as awards for reaching a significant % of total power generation from solar, and kickbacks to companies manufacturing solar panels.
Current state of renewables simply don't scale, not if we want to maintain the same quality of life. Maintain, not improve. There is no solution. You can shit up people's quality of life, but you'll get pushback, especially as the shit won't be evenly applied.
Honestly the only energy sources I have hope for are geothermal and nuclear. And nuclear has a long list of caveats in that even in the face of overwhelming security precautions, black swan events can have outsized disparate impact. I hope we crack fusion regardless.
There is definitely a way to make our world much more ecologically sustainable - bomb all non-agrarian Third World countries to glass. If "degrowth mindset" is in vogue, might as well go all the way and yank the ladder out from countries seeking to take advantage of readily accessible cheap fuel to industrialize.
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What sort of costs do you have in mind?
If you are thinking of abandoned wells, this is certainly something that oil companies would rather skip -- but the tech is well understood, and in no way does the cost overwhelm the value of the well's lifetime production. It's a hole in the ground -- you fill it with cement and walk away. This procedure is performed multiple times during the development of the well, it's nothing crazy.
Groundwater corruption is the one that immediately jumps out at me. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-contaminate-drinking-water/ Who the fuck knows what the long-term consequences of shoving all these toxic chemicals into groundwater are going to be? We're already seeing it fuck up drinking water and wells in the region, and I think that sacrificing a bunch of perfectly usable farmland forever (or spending immense amounts of money and resources on cleanup/mitigation efforts) in exchange for some low EROEI fossil fuels is one of the worst trade deals in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.
I was going to go with my usual "this complaint is bullshit and proves that you have no idea how oil wells work" response -- but of course this being the Motte I am morally compelled to RTFA!
And I'm so glad I did -- they've constructed a marvelous motte:
So the bailey on this complaint is usually something like "fracking formations several thousands of meters underground which are capped by impermeable layers (a big part of the reason they contain hydrocarbons!) somehow bleeds up into groundwater aquifers that are more like hundreds of feet -- I'll grant that there probably sometime in history exists a case where a casing/cement failure resulted in direct groundwater contamination from a fracking operation, but it's very much in the best interests of the drilling crew to avoid this so it's certainly very rare; by no means a "cost of doing business" for the process.
There never was much of a motte, but now (!) a researcher finds some badly built settling ponds leaching into the groundwater! The bad (?) news is that this is by no means inherent to the process either, and probably a major EPA violation -- modern operations line their pits with EPDM, on pain of prosecution.
So yeah -- contaminating groundwater is bad! The thing is, lots of industries have instances where people occasionally get sloppy and contaminate soil/groundwater! Oil & Gas is pretty good on the whole -- they make so much money they can afford to do stuff like lay down plastic over the entire drilling lease before moving any equipment on there! And test the soil once they are done, trucking any that's been contaminated away for treatment! This is completely routine in the industry! They still make shitloads of money, even on relatively expensive shale gas projects!
So the point is, that "seeing it fuck up drinking water and wells in the region, and ... sacrificing a bunch of perfectly usable farmland forever (or spending immense amounts of money and resources on cleanup/mitigation efforts) in exchange for some low EROEI fossil fuels" is totally not true -- if you think that, it's because you have been exposed to a toxic information environment.
The crucial question vis a vis the discussion at hand is this: would knowing what I've just told you (hypothetically; assume that I am someone who has worked on the ground in this industry and that you trust, instead of an anonymous rando on a forum full of weirdos) change your mind about shale gas being a bad idea -- or does your true objection lie elsewhere?
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If they're bridges to nowhere, they've at least kept us warm now. Ultimate costs which leave us further behind? Has never happened on more than a regional level, very rarely on more than a local one. The world would not be better off without coal power, hydro power, or nuclear power despite the various problems associated with all of them. On the other hand, anti-energy is not just a bridge to nowhere, it's just stopping. You're not going to advance anything once you're shivering in the dark, with no shipping, no air travel, on a calorie-restricted diet and the way out of this is well-known (burn fuel) but the environmentalist elite won't let you use it.
"Sure this bridge stops halfway across the canyon, but at least it has kept me moving forward for now!" is not actually a compelling argument against my point.
This has never been my contention, even to the point that I explicitly supported hydro power! But the problem with fossil fuels specifically is that they aren't renewable on any scale or timeline that matters to people, and as they decline our total energy budget will go down as well. I'm not suggesting that we stop using them at all, and anyone who did stop would be immediately outcompeted by people who did. I think a better way to get across my view here would be a financial metaphor.
Say you won the lottery one day - you got a massive lump sum with tons of money. You quit your job and stop making money the way you used to, and just live off this giant pile of savings, a giant pile which is not going to be renewed. My contention is that you should save a bunch of this money for the future - maybe there's a really great investment opportunity coming in the future that requires a substantial amount of capital. My position is that you absolutely should not waste this sudden windfall in a spree of profligate spending under the assumption that you can just win the lottery again. When the "economic elite" tells you that you should save a bunch of money for the future and retool your lifestyle so that you're not spending so much money that you'll run out well before you die of old age, are they just unaware that your second lottery win is right around the corner?
To abandon the metaphor, how confident are you that the hypothetical energy-generating technologies of the future aren't going to require a significant investment of energy to get them fully integrated into society in a usable way? Think about the immense costs associated with completely ripping out the petroleum-based infrastructure in the US and replacing it with something more sustainable. That's a massive economic undertaking and right now the US government cannot even maintain basic infrastructure in broad swathes of the country, let alone go on massive civic improvement projects. Hell, even the late Romans were capable of building border walls!
The analogy has been pushed past its useful point. If various energy technologies do not in fact lead to a glorious carbon-free renewable future, they are still useful in they keep us warm and -- assuming arguendo we do need to reach this glorious carbon-free renewable future -- able to look for other ways to get there.
I'm sure they will requires an investment of energy. But if they're a good investment and industrial society is still functioning, it will be available. And that's a lot more likely if we don't impose austerity plans to "save" the shale in the ground.
Spare me the rhetorical talking points. The US not only can but does maintain basic infrastructure (and more than basic) in the vast majority of the country. There are exceptions for various political and economic reasons, but none would somehow prevent the introduction of a new method of power generation, nor would any amount of "saving" make those exceptions better.
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If nukes and fossil fuels aren't bridge tech we are doomed to revert to pre industrial life anyways.
Hydro is nice, but most the good spots are already taken, and environmentalists oppose it as well.
Geothermal is proving hard. Again, we need bridge tech, which is nukes and fossil fuels. This isn't like a parachute. The environmental movement is like stabbing yourself in the leg in the middle of the desert and pouring out your canteen. Maybe it's impossible to make it to fusion or cheap, reliable, high capacity batteries. But you should try. And trying means growth.
Plus, climate change concerns are silly if greens are correct about green energy. If the tech actually worked we could set CO2 levels to whatever we wanted on a yearly basis.
To use a metaphor from elsewhere in the rationalist space, picture yourself at the bottom of a mountain range, the high peaks covered with clouds and impossible to clearly see from the ground. You have enough supplies to climb up one or two of the mountains - how confident are you that you're going to climb up a mountain which has a rest-area that allows you to recover and resupply before journeying further upwards? If it turns out that fusion is indeed a boondoggle which cannot support society, then spending energy and resources trying to reach it is a terrible idea when those resources could be saved for another, more promising project.
How confident are you that nuclear is the technology of the future, as opposed to something like finding a way to use zero point energy? How certain are you that nuclear power isn't something that can only be economically exploited by a society with access to far more energy and technology than we have now? From where I'm standing you have an awful lot of work ahead of you if you want to actually make the claim that it is nuclear or bust, and that claim seems to me like it is at the heart of your position here. If we live in the kind of world that I'm positing (and there's a decent chance we are!) then just "trying" like you're suggesting is actually the path to primitive existence that you've been trying to avoid.
If we reach that level then there is no point discussing energy because we have effectively become a post scarcity society and can just do whatever we want. That hypothetical future is effectively post singularity and impossible to talk about in any real way.
In your mountain range analogy, you have to add the caveat that you also starve to death if you just stay in the valley. Which is what you are proposing.
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Like some sort of primitivists? I go with mistake theory, I think it's more that leftism is virtually ignorant of the concept of trade offs. Any negatives are because of a lack of will; just get the right people in power and spend money and we can have zero carbon energy for our dense, walkable, clean, safe, cities.
As far as I can tell the environmental movement wants us to repent for our sins of overindulgence by dramatically scaling back our consumption. Whether or not a proposed regulation actually helps the environment is of little relevance. For an example, see plastic bag bans.
It doesn't matter that the "reusable" bags mandated for sale are far more carbon intensive and contain far more plastics than the flimsy plastic bags they've been mandated to replace. It doesn't matter if you know that none of the trash in your region is transported by barge. The true aim of the ban is to curb the sin of consuming disposable plastics. If an environmentalist were looking at a spreadsheet of plastic bag consumption before and after a ban, and they saw a 5% drop, they'd count it as a win, regardless of the fact that post-ban bags are about 30 grams and pre-ban are 5 grams. On a materials basis you'd break even when you reduced consumption to 16% of what it once was.
Google for plastic bag ban effectiveness and all you'll see supporters pointing to are bag counts: www.google.com/search?q=plastic+bag+ban+effectiveness
None are claiming a drop in consumption large enough to offset the extra materials.
They seem completely uninterested in fixes that enable current levels of consumption to continue while mitigating or eliminating environmental impacts.
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Have a look at what certain people in the UK see as a viable and desirable vision for the future:
https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/75916920-51f6-4f9c-ade5-52cbf55d5e73/content
Page 6 has a quick chart that explains their vision. No meat, no shipping, no airports, much less heating, much less road use, massive austerity in construction. They're big on electricity production though. And all of this (a 20-30 year Greater Depression) comes with an enormous price tag and mobilization of national resources! An apocalyptic vision if ever there was one.
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Perhaps. But a lot of the green activists talk about the need to reduce the number of humans we have.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49601678
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I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think this is the best fallacy for your argument.
Texas is both a leader in shale and wind energy. Also has a Tesla battery factor. Even if you are right for when shale oil production will fall the energy people have pursued both paths at the same time.
I agree, I think the us should be deploying reactors asap, although I think the above poster vastly overstates the problems with shale oil. Shales are outrageously abundant in the US and break even costs remain far below current oil prices. https://www.statista.com/statistics/748207/breakeven-prices-for-us-oil-producers-by-oilfield/
(This is during a time period characterized by lots of inflation in the materials needed to frac)
Not to mention shale = a stepping stone to tech and regulations for geothermal
Which there was just had an announcement on: https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-technology-breakthrough-in-next-generation-geothermal/
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