This statement has some inaccuracies in it, it is true that it will literally result in more oil from other places, but, given supply and demand, it will result in less additional oil from other sources.
Whenever a cheap source of a good is eliminated the average production price of that good is increased (assuming there is an exhaustible supply of that good at that price) so the removal, or even inconveniencing of access, to tar sands extract will cause an up-tick in prices overall and a likely unnoticeable dip in supply.
Additionally, as a Canadian myself, the Alberta oils sands have recently contributed strongly to an economic crisis in Calgary as extraction profitability has sharply declined. There is a lot of oil still left up there but Alberta needs to act now, while it has the funds to do so, to transition their economy. It is not a feasible long term revenue source.
Alberta seems to be expecting this oil thing to keep the province going forever; it is over. Diversify, try new things, for your sake and the sake of the rest of Canada. Please stop expecting this to get better. 2015 was a warning, it's now officially ending and the time to start moving on has passed, every day not diversifying the economy of Alberta is just a day of economic procrastination.
Edit: Sure energy security, keep some for us, but let's not make it the backbone of our economy.
Energy security, not propping up authoritarian regimes with terrible human rights records, not requiring military interventions to protect a stable supply of oil.
Maybe not good enough reasons to change the balance, but reasons nonetheless.
Obviously, you're right long-term but it's a slow transition not a switch we can flip.
And trains lend themselves much better to slow declining transition than a new pipeline. Can be used for other cargo; are a bit more expensive so they are a mild financial disincentive; the contaminated material (tanker cars) are by definition mobile and therefore easier to deal with at EOL.
The problem there is if you need to do it quickly: if the SUV/truck trend hadn’t caught on, for example, fleet economy wouldn’t have reversed the improvements we saw in the 80s and early 90s. The longer we wait, the harder that gradual transition will be.
People keep saying that Alberta needs to diversify as though this is some sort of epiphany that the province refuses to have, but it honestly just reveals the ignorance of the person making that claim regarding the current economic state of Canadian provinces.
They aren't diversified enough.
Given strongly inelastic demand, I would say very marginally less.
> Whenever a cheap source of a good is eliminated the average production price of that good is increased (assuming there is an exhaustible supply of that good at that price) so the removal, or even inconveniencing of access, to tar sands extract will cause an up-tick in prices overall and a likely unnoticeable dip in supply.
I think we're saying the same thing?
> Additionally, as a Canadian myself, the Alberta oils sands have recently contributed strongly to an economic crisis in Calgary as extraction profitability has sharply declined. There is a lot of oil still left up there but Alberta needs to act now, while it has the funds to do so, to transition their economy. It is not a feasible long term revenue source.
Yes, they had better get serious about transitioning the economy away from oil before Calgary becomes a ghost town. People sure aren't there for the weather.
People will find ways to reduce their car commute when prices spike and, especially, oil power plants will defer operation to cheaper (possibly less clean :sigh:) alternatives.
Secondly, the majority of Canada's economy is service oriented, but due to the way Canada is structured, the super-majority of the transfer payments that the federal government makes to the various provinces comes from resource extraction generated revenues.
The following statements are not meant to be value judgements, they are just simple statements of fact that should give color to the context that is missing from the parent comment. For non-Canadian HN users, in order to guarantee a relatively equal standard of living for Canadian citizens regardless of where they happen to live, the federal government distributes billions of dollars every year to various provinces, taking from the more wealthy provinces and helping shore up the budgets of the less wealthy provinces. These revenues have been generated in overwhelmingly large part by resource extraction, and the service oriented economies of other provinces show 0 possibility of taking up the slack for these revenues should resource extraction end, they simply don't generate enough surplus on a per-capita basis. Without these revenues large portions of Canada would face absolutely devastating cuts to government revenues and thus services, and frankly no government has really put forth any sort of solution to this, outside of larger deficits on a temporary basis. How Canada navigates this difference between its aspirations, a service oriented non-resource economy, and the reality on the ground, an absolute dependence on resource revenues for current quality of life, is probably the biggest question it will face in the 21st Century.
For non-Canadians, if you live in certain economic development zones the Canadian government effectively pays you a bunch of money annually (Northern Residents Deduction) to just keep living there. We just saw how vulnerable these communities are to natural disasters like a pandemic - they also often suffer food security problems during blizzards and rail outages[1]. If there's an economic reason to support communities up there I'm all for it, but I really don't see why we want to go out of our way to subsidize that life choice.
Also specifically on the topic of BC real-estate-as-a-service - it's pretty fucking insane and I have no idea why this market is sustaining itself at this point, we're all due for a shock one of these days that will hurt really bad. That said - BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by the real estate market and, if we saw a price drop, we'd likely see a lot more labour market accessibility go along with it.
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/churchill-rail-servi...
As you can see this has absolutely nothing to do with projecting territorial claims, which is why I specifically did not mention that in my description. As I did specifically mention in order to provide relatively level standards of living across the country the federal government transfers money away from more wealthy provinces to less wealthy provinces. As you can see from the table in that link I posted above, provinces like Quebec receive over 10% of their annual budget in the form of transfer payments, this is an even larger percentage of the budget for some of the maritime nations. If you look at the second table on that page you'll note that literally only Ontario and Alberta have higher than Canadian average, average incomes, indicating that these transfer payments are largely funded by those two provinces, and because Alberta is so much higher, it is largely funded by them. As I indicated, figuring out a way to square the reality of these payments vanishing with the current quality of life they afford is a huge challenge for Canada.
Secondly, you talk about Alberta needing to diversify but say "BC's economy is still only ~20% driven by real estate", do you understand that this means that BC is less diversified than Alberta? That BC is more dependent on a single sector, and that sector is literally just flipping homes, not doing any sort of productive manufacturing, or providing a service? Like, I'm not sure how you're so confident in your diagnosis of Alberta's woes, while simultaneously appearing to have no concern for BC?
On the topic of BC's economy, it is unhealthy but the fact that BC's economy comes 17.4%[1] still only puts it 4.4% above Canada at large (13.01%)[2] - that compares to Alberta which derives 16.12% of it's economy from mineral/oil/gas extraction which is 7.9% above Canada at large (8.21%)[2].
BC absolutely has a real estate issue and it's quite concerning - but there is a lot more "natural" activity in that sector nation-wide compared with Alberta's oil dependency. I think it's also fair to view that while the 17.4% of BC's GDP covers pretty much all the economic activity related to real-estate the 16.12% in Alberta misses a lot of the knock-on benefits of the oil industry and dependent businesses... but that's an opinion.
1. (sourced 2018 - wikipedia) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/British_... I rounded up in the previous post
2. (sourced 2017 - wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industri...
3. (sourced 2019 - statistica whatever that is) https://www.statista.com/statistics/608354/gdp-distribution-...
And yet, Alberta was the most economically successful province, literally subsidizing all others. Go figure how the service transition worked out...
Norway has been handling their fossil fuels remarkably intelligently.
How so? Oil production is ticking back up and is higher than any time since about 2010.
The only problem here is that Alberta was forced to give up all its money in equalization payment, and has none left.
It was literally all stolen by the Federal government through equalization payment. Can't really blame Alberta here...
Because all modern-day chip are so much environmentally friendly...
[1] https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/major-canadian-oilsands-producers...
[2] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/oil-companies-net-...
It's fine to encourage companies to try and do things like that, but it's also important to keep that congratulatory tone in check when it comes to a world that still incentivizes profits singularly and doesn't necessarily put the price of ecologic externalities that they might deserve.
Net-zero sounds perhaps cool but there should be some important education done for everybody to understand that it's far from Gross-zero (or near zero), which would be much closer to what we actually need to avoid some pretty cataclysmic collapses sooner than most people realize.
Edit: I take that back, it's always been a Canadian company. I'm thinking about something else, there was another takeover or merge with a US company back before 2000. That's before the Suncor merger.
Very heartening to see though.
The downvotes are because they disagree with your politics.
The tough part is all your statements hold truth. We must face that if we want to find real answers.
Down voting is supposed to be used to indicate a comment has no relevance to the conversation. Conversely, each of your statements must be part of the conversation.
[ upvoted ]
( instantly downvoted )
[ upvoted ]
( instantly downvoted )
This site's guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Maybe people don't like nuance and prefer to see the world in black and white where it agrees or disagrees with their views. I don't like to believe that's true, but it probably is in general.
Now, if you wanted to criticize the downvote mechanism in general, maybe it would be considered off topic by HN rules, but it certainly wouldn't be unreasonable.
Edit: Also, perhaps some of your downvotes are due to your commenting on your own downvotes. Personally, I always downvote those kinds of comments (including the self-fulfilling-prophecy version: "I'll be downvoted/flagged for this, but..."), even if I find the rest of the post interesting, or completely agree with them. But I have no idea if other people do that.
At best I think one could argue I phrased things such that it rubbed people the wrong way. Possibly the last comment about politicians.
Actually, it's not. It should be, but it's not. In fact, on HN, downvoting purely to signal disagreement, without offering any rebuttal or substance, is working-as-intended. pg and dang have said so themselves. It's one of the reasons HN is not actually the place to go for those who are intellectually curious, despite that being the site's claimed purpose.
I do feel a bit sympathetic for the company driving this project. They invested billions of dollars and over a decade of time only to see the project killed at the last minute. This is a consequence of our erratic and unpredictable political system - every four years we seem to completely change energy policy. It's the price of our democracy, but I'm sure it's frustrating for CEOs.
Edit: It's frustrating to see the parent comment get downvoted. If you disagree, explain why in a comment - no need to bury a perfectly reasonable perspective.
Have you got a good source for this? I can only find information about ocean oil spills for transport. The rail ones are barely ever mentioned and much less than the pipeline ones.
... (not my area, but I was curious too)
> Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines.
Or maybe Obama, Trump, and Biden had different ideas about what "better for the USA" meant that led to them making reasonably rational but different decisions? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.
Yes, that's basically what politics is about in a nutshell, making different tradeoffs based on values. I'm not sure any of them actually had a sufficiently detailed analysis or model to justify having any certainty in their decision.
> But I'm not sure your assumption that all three of those presidents have a worse understanding of this issue than you do is justified.
Don't get me wrong, I don't understand the issue either. I'm just honest about that fact and merely espoused why it's a complicated dilemma. This is all unintentional consequences and it's not clear which was the best call for the environment, the countries involved, or the world at large.
I would have liked to see an in-depth study of the tradeoffs and a rational decision based on that rather than a political decision, which seems to be what we got all three times.
Killing the pipeline will help but not in a vacuum. Continued policy/pressure needs to be applied to move away from oil, which is probably best for the sake of the world.
I've never made that argument.
Edit: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Would you please stop doing that? It's against the rules because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to exist for. That means it's an abuse of the site and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what their ideology happens to be.
> I've never made that argument.
You certainly have. It's one you make frequently, with copious citations of your own comments about how you get emails from people on the left saying they feel biased against, and from people on the right saying they feel biased against, therefore HN must be well balanced.
However, you neglect to address the issue that comments from one political perspective are heavily downvoted and flagged by users having the other political perspective, while the inverse doesn't happen, leading to a natural, obvious bias in the comments.
As well, prominent members of the community, like Thomas Ptacek and Don Hopkins, are regularly seen abusing others based on their political and religious beliefs, and I have yet to see you ask them to obey the rules or threaten to ban them. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26663440 Of course, your standard response is, "We can't see everything. Email us if you want us to do something about something." But that rings hollow, considering how long it's been going on--I can't fathom that you've never seen either of those two karma leaders act that way before.
And whether you have or not is beside the point, which is: HN is heavily biased in one direction. Users who make comments like that are not downvoted, flagged, or reported to anywhere near the degree that users on the other side of those issues are--this is obvious to anyone who takes a few minutes to browse submissions on these topics with showdead on (or even with it off, just looking at the gray comments).
If I had posted a comment like Hopkins's, but about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, it would have quickly been flagged, and you would have been summoned, and the account would probably have been instantly banned. There is one set of rules for the haves (high-karma accounts), and another set for the have-nots.
But even if you would personally act on egregious comments from both sides the same way (which is hard to believe, given Ptacek's and Hopkins's regular, unchastised rants), the fact remains that the majority of the user base is biased, and the end result reflects that.
And despite your regular explanations of how you feel HN is well balanced, I have never seen you acknowledge this. Maybe it should be known as HN's open secret, the elephant in the room that no one--not even the curious--is allowed to talk about.
There's a second non sequitur I encounter a lot too—people often interpret this empirical observation about user behavior as some sort of disagreement with their politics or some sort of endorsement of political centrism. That also is not what I'm saying and does not follow.
I definitely hadn't seen the comment you linked to. You seem to be overestimating how many HN comments I actually read. Had I seen it, I would have posted a reply saying that religious flamewar is not ok on Hacker News. That's a no-brainer—it's bog-standard HN moderation and has nothing to do with which religion is involved, nor which users.
> If I had posted a comment like Hopkins's, but about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc,
You seem to be alleging religious bias in HN moderation. That couldn't be more wrong, as anyone can verify for themselves: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Religious flamewar gets exactly the same response, regardless of which religion (or which variety of irreligion) people are flaming about.
> I've certainly said many times that people with strong passions feel that HN is biased against their views, and that this phenomenon is isomorphic under varying political persuasion. What I've not said is that this means that "HN must be unbiased" or "well balanced". That's clearly a non sequitur, and moreover it's one I'm careful never to make. If you can find even one place where I said that, out of 50,000 moderation posts, I'd be impressed.
Of course, I don't have time to go through that many of your comments. What I have noted, numerous times, is your saying that, since people on both sides of the political spectrum perceive a bias against them, HN must not be so biased after all. Maybe you meant that HN policy or moderation is not biased in that way, but that isn't what I meant, either. See below.
> There's a second non sequitur I encounter a lot too—people often interpret this empirical observation about user behavior as some sort of disagreement with their politics or some sort of endorsement of political centrism. That also is not what I'm saying and does not follow.
Ok, but that isn't what I meant.
> I definitely hadn't seen the comment you linked to. You seem to be overestimating how many HN comments I actually read. Had I seen it, I would have posted a reply saying that religious flamewar is not ok on Hacker News. That's a no-brainer—it's bog-standard HN moderation and has nothing to do with which religion is involved, nor which users.
> You seem to be alleging religious bias in HN moderation. That couldn't be more wrong, as anyone can verify for themselves: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Religious flamewar gets exactly the same response, regardless of which religion (or which variety of irreligion) people are flaming about.
No, that isn't what I mean. I don't think that you, personally, or any other HN moderators, would tolerate bigotry against one religion while allowing it against others.
What I mean is that--and this is my crucial point about all of HN's bias issues--the users are biased, and this results in a de facto, shall we say, community moderation bias.
As I said: If I had posted a comment like Hopkins's, but about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, it would have quickly been flagged, and you would have been summoned... But no one flagged Hopkins's comment, and no one summoned you for it. And the nasty series of personal attacks I saw tptacek write recently, in a very high-traffic thread, did not result in flags, summonses, or even mere downvotes--because he was attacking a user for espousing a right-leaning political perspective (which would have been considered centrist only a few years ago).
My observations, having followed HN for years now, lead me to conclude that there is a motivated number of HN users who use downvoting and flagging to censor comments that are contrary to popular left-leaning views. I don't see the same kind of downvoting and flagging used against left-leaning comments.
So even though HN's official policies may not be to censor right-leaning comments, and even though you personally may not do so, that doesn't matter--the users who abuse their privileges in this way are numerous enough for them to have the desired effect. This goes back to my original comment, which was flagged, and which you chastised me for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27455349 It seems to prove my point.
(Yes, yes, the Guidelines(TM) disallow speaking of the behavior that shall not be named, of course. I guess someday that guideline will fall out of fashion--after all, public character assassination is permitted on HN (cf. Matthias Felleisen), so it seems absurd to not be able to discuss the use of selective community censorship to facilitate that.)
Alternatively, since downvoting for disagreement is HN policy, maybe that is the desired effect, tacitly, in a kind of, "Oh, that's too bad..." way. Plausible deniability, and all. This isn't intended as a slight against you, but I can only go by what I observe.
I wonder if, being a moderator and dealing with private complaints and egregious examples daily, could, in a way, give you a misleading impression of what is common on HN, similar to how law enforcement sees the worst of society on a regular basis. I don't get to hear from far-leftists and far-rightists complaining in emails about perceived biases--I just look at what gets deaded and flagged. I just look at the end result, which is all that matters in the end.
I appreciate your reply, anyway.
I think if I were to reply further I would probably just repeat what I said before, so I'll refrain. If there's some specific point you think I didn't address, let me know.
>dissenters are less censorious and more oriented toward discussion
This is a really broad insult and complement to two really broad categories of people. This is frankly almost as over-general as saying "people I agree with are good people and people I disagree with are bad people".
BTW, friendly correction: complement vs. compliment.
Your other points were creative even if a little /edgy/ and could(will?) get conversation on their own.
Electric is approaching winning on its own merits. Giving billions to horrible people in the mean time is not an acceptable solution.
Oil independence is great for America and Canada. Independence “from” oil is a separate if related matter.
A half way point is to allow drilling and pipeline and add taxes to local oil and major tariffs on external oil.
We get oil independence, alternative tech will be encouraged to replace expensive oil. Only losers are people that use oil.
That is a recent thing. It can easily go the other way again.
Shut down as many pipelines as we can, stop producing oil, build solar farms, build wind farms, build nuclear, everything should be on the table and done simultaneously if we want our grandchildren to have a live remotely similar to ours.
The framing of governments and media seems like only half steps are possible, but those steps will still kill us.
Obviously if all oil companies magically shutdown today human society would be cataclysmically affected. That would never going to happen short of a "Childhood's End" style alien invasion. Any change, even with extreme external pressure, would be gradual.
That's why one must always advocate for the position purely and without compromise. Shut down this pipeline, shut down the next one that comes up. Etc etc.
"Reasonable" perspectives have not helped the planet at all in the past 50 years.
==========
EDIT:
One more thought, let's consider how EFFECTIVE the oil industry has been. Continuous profits, continuous increase in production, great subsidies. How did they do this?
Well, for one thing, they knew about global warming was caused by burning fossil fuels decades before admitting it publicly. They argued from the strongest framing of their position: "fossil fuels don't cause global warning so nothing should change"
It's only in the past decade or so that they put on a face of caring about renewables. That's because public pressure grew enough that the strongest portrayal of their side was acting like they're already doing everything they can.
Moral of the story, if you want to be affective don't compromise. The benefit of caring about the environment is at least we don't have to lie about our side, just boldly state truths and what should happen.
If that is your perspective then don't expect anyone to compromise with you in return.
You drive away both the opposition, as well as people in the middle, like myself, with policy positions like the one you are giving.
You could not hope to convince much of anyone in the middle, if you are unwilling to recognize opposing arguments, or address points of criticism.
If you won't budge an inch, then you should expect to lose to status quo bias, from people who would just choose to do nothing, instead of taking on an extreme position.
But we're both nobodies on a public forum arguing, why, oh why, should one start from a compromised position?
It's also possible that eventually we'll make plastic using CO2 as the feed-stock rather than oil.
As a citizen of Earth, I'm of mixed feelings. On the one hand heavy crude from the tar sands, which is some of the most polluting oil on the planet, because it requires so much energy to extract, will keep shipping by rail to the United States. That involves more spills than a pipeline and burning yet more fuel. That's bad.
On the other hand that makes the prices higher and both constrains the volume of output and the price at which it's profitable to extract. Both things that mean more of that tar sands oil will stay in the ground. That's good.
On the other, other hand - more tar sands oil staying in the ground means more oil from elsewhere in the world, often from politically unstable or unfriendly regimes will replace the oil the US otherwise would have imported from Canada. That's potentially bad.
I'm not sure which outcome is better for Canada, the USA, or the world. I'm pretty sure neither Obama, Trump, not Biden had any accurate idea either.
Edit: and the downvotes are because you disagree with my economic analysis? Or because you think any of those politicians actually have a solid, fundamental analysis including unintentional consequences? Get real, they did it for political reasons, that's why they came out on different sides of the issue based on party lines. Actually judging by the downvotes, I think it was a smart political move. I really wish HN would require a comment with a downvote, even if it's only visible to the OP.