Originally Posted by Frequitude
I don't ignore them, I just place them lower in priority. My priority would be as follows:
Oil & gas development
Climate change
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Diversification
I'll start with oil & gas development > diversification because it's easy. Saying "we should diversify" is largely a naive feel good buzz phrase not at all rooted in fundamental economics. We have been bestowed oil & gas. We are extremely, extremely fortunate for that. Oil and gas is an extremely valuable resource that the world wants for it dense caloric value, calorific value that is required to improve or sustain a standard of living, and calorific value that far exceeds the number of calories we have to spend to get it out of the ground and sell it. It's the hand we've been dealt. The greatest way to maximize our standard of living as Albertans and Canadians is to get it out of the ground as fast and efficiently as possible. If instead you want to diversify away from oil & gas, then please accept the reduced standard of living that will come with it.
When I think about diversification, I don't consider it at the expense of oil and gas development. We have figured out how to do it, as you say, in a way where the caloric input is far outweighed by the caloric output. That is good, lets do that. We can ALSO look at how to develop other energies so that in the inevitable situation where a technological break though happens that makes one or some combination of alternatives energies a viable and economic option, Canada and Alberta isn't left holding a bag of something no one wants. The world will always need oil, because it's not only used for energy. So why not look at supplementing the part of it that we can (ie, the energy side)?
Climate change and environment is a tougher one. I believe it is valid, I believe that oil & gas production and consumption contributes to it, and I believe that it's consequences contribute negatively to our standard of living. So we are inherently faced with a tradeoff between improving our standard of living by exploiting a fortunate endowment of a valueable resource and reducing our standard of living by continuing climate change it results in. However my belief is that the calorific value of oil & gas and the financial benefit it generates can be used to drive society towards a more environmentally sustainable energy source.
I think that this is true, but I also think that, at this point, this process is moving too slowly because we are allowing profit-driven enterprise to control it. Often times this is the best way to drive innovation. But I believe we are in a situation where we can't exactly wait for some undetermined time when alternatives can overtake O&G from a pure profit perspective, especially when O&G companies actively lobby against alternative energy incentives. If they were putting a substantial amount their profits into alternative R&D, I might agree with you. There are situations where the public sector needs to force the market, I think this is one of those times.
Joules are needed to sustain our standard of living, joules are needed to eventually diversify into other businesses, and joules are needed to develop more environmentally sustainable energy sources. However the first law of thermodynamics teaches us that joules are not free. Thank god we as Albertans and Canadians have been gifted a tremendous number of joules right below our feet.
Billions of gigajoules hit us and every other part of Earth every single day, and yes, it is free. If the amount of research that has been done into how to get oil out of the ground had been pushed towards solar, I firmly believe we would be there already. The problem is that if people can gather their own energy, there's no (or very little) corporate profit that can be made off of it. My thoughts on that are who f***ing cares?
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