Fall in oil

Originally posted by finnegan
There is a far bigger story to falling oil prices than people are willing to discuss here. The reality is that oil and gas reserves are vastly over valued in our stock markets because they fail to accept that, in reality, most of those reserves can never be used. They will either be closed off to protect our environment from climate change, or climate chan ...[text shortened]... ave their necessary effect - even at the cost of selling at a lower price into a falling market.

Originally posted by normbenign
Do you know what speculation is? If speculators misjudge the market, they lose a ton of money very fast.

Sure they also may effect a market as well, but only for a short time period. Over exuberance leads to bubbles, leads to big losses.

Originally posted by Eladar
Leftists politicians don't like burning fuel?

Leftist politicians don't have private jet planes and live in large fuel consuming mansions?

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
a rational response? The Saudis are sitting on huge reserves, why would they not want to cut back production if it meant more profitability for them?

The potential impact of the oil price slump on Scotland was underlined as a leading energy expert warned on Wednesday that North Sea oilfields could be shut down if the oil price fell by just a few more dollars.

The rising sense of crisis about the plummeting price – which has fallen 60% in the last six months – prompted the Scottish government to promise an emergency taskforce to try to preserve jobs in the offshore energy sector.

Meanwhile, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England warned that the Scottish economy was heading for a “negative shock”.

The oil industry consultancy Wood Mackenzie said that at the current price for Brent blend, of $46 a barrel, some UK production was already failing to break even, and further falls could endanger output.

Robert Plummer, a research analyst with the firm, said that at $50 a barrel oil production was costing more than its value in 17 countries, including the US and UK.

NASA and NOAA have just reported that global surface temperatures in 2014 were the hottest on record. That also means 2014 was likely the hottest the Earth has been in millennia, and perhaps as much as 100,000 years.

This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades. While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases

In short, global warming continues unabated, and claims of a “pause” are misguided. Because of human-caused global warming, average years today are hotter than El Niño years just a decade ago, and the Earth continues to accumulate immense amounts of heat. Despite short-term noise, that long-term trend will continue until we cut our carbon pollution and curb global warming.

The risk of not acting on climate change (very possibly catastrophic) is far greater than the risk of incurring costs that were not needed after all.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/dec/30/time-is-running-out-on-climate-denial

We only get to play this game once.

It is 'impossible' for today’s big oil companies to adapt to climate change

the lengths they went to to justify their continuing investments in new hydrocarbons (to the tune of billions of dollars every year) have become more and more extreme. Even the emergence of the ‘unburnable carbon’ analysis (with the headline that very significant percentages of already proven, extractable reserves of coal, oil and gas will need to stay in the ground to give us any chance at all of avoiding the spectre of runaway – and potentially irreversible – climate change) left them entirely unmoved.

Please remember that these are companies that employ some of the best scientists in the world, and who have explored in commendable detail various scenarios regarding the impact of climate-induced change. One of Shell’s scenarios is appropriately titled ‘Chaos’, but apparently without the remotest trace of irony.

And these are companies whose senior managers know, as an irrefutable fact, that their current business model threatens both the stability of the global economy and the longer-term prospects of humankind as a whole. Once knowledge of that kind has been internalised, for any individual, however well-meaning and ‘sincere’ they may be, it must get harder and harder to look oneself in the mirror every morning and feel anything other than moral regret.

All oil majors are trapped by a short-term mandate that leaves little room for manoeuvre. Shareholder expectations still dominate, and are still largely untouched by any kind of ‘unburnable carbon’ analysis of the staggering amount of economic value now at risk.

More tech should be devoted to carbon sinks e.g. plants

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
More tech should be devoted to carbon sinks e.g. plants

Originally posted by DeepThought
I'm curious as to what technology you think is needed?

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
Find some way to speed up wild plant growth perhaps or find ways to dispose of vegetable waste that don't involve burning. Stuff like that. Plants absorb CO2 by their nature.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
Find some way to speed up wild plant growth perhaps or find ways to dispose of vegetable waste that don't involve burning. Stuff like that. Plants absorb CO2 by their nature.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink

we are at the point where we are the meteor. Our impact on life on Earth is not as spectacular, nor as instantaneous; but in geological terms it might as well be. As the planet warms up, and carbon dioxide acidifies the oceans, all bets are off – except the ones hinging on mass extinctions. As one scientist quoted here puts it: “Look around you. Kill half of what you see. Or if you’re feeling generous, just kill about a quarter of what you see.”

if all civilisation were to end now, then 100m years hence, everything we have built would be compressed, in the geological record, to a layer of sediment “not much thicker than a cigarette paper”, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it.

14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the turn of the century.

The analysis was published on Friday by Nasa and Noaa researchers.

Last month, the World Meteorological Organization released provisional figures that predicted the past 12 months were set to be record breakers.

The long-term global average temperature is calculated from data collected between 1951 and 1980.

"This is the latest in a series of warm years, in a series of warm decades," said Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"Climate change is happening, and as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, national scientific academies and scientific organisations across the world have all concluded [that] human activities, particularly burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, are primarily responsible."