If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If you include the costs of pollution and climate change, I'm sure the "total value" of the extracted oil is well in the negative.
Either way, there is no reason to let companies off the hook for their negative impacts just because the product they produce has some societal benefit.
> If you include the costs of pollution and climate change, I'm sure the "total value" of the extracted oil is well in the negative.
This is absolutely not true. Oil and gas has lifted billions out of poverty and increased everyone’s quality of life hugely. Especially in “third world” countries where there are no affordable alternative energy sources.
Fossil fuels have certainly helped improve the lives of billions. At the same time, the negative impact can't be overstated, and only gets worse with time (the more the climate changes, the higher the future cost).
Additionally, oil extracted in California for domestic consumption doesn't affect third world countries, so it's irrelevant what positive impact it might make halfway across the world.
I feel like manufacturing the collapse of the very ecosystems that sustain our civilization might be a steep price to pay for a short moment's increase in living standards. But i guess as long as we're all dead before the time to repay the debt comes, we can pretend like we're self-made millionaires and not living on borrowed money?
If the benefit of burning carbon exceeds the costs associated with burning carbon then people will burn CO2 and society will get wealthier.
If the costs exceed the benefits, then society will get wealthier simply from stopping self destructive behaviour.
Amazing right?
Except we don't charge the full cost of the negative externalities so oil companies cause a lot of damage because they are under the mistaken impression that their current extraction rates are useful to society.
The reason why we care about the negative externalities of fossil fuels is that they are most likely permanent but the benefit is temporary. So the cost benefit analysis tells us we are burning too much and this ends up harming us actually and it is just that we haven't experienced most of the harm yet.
This is an important distinction, $1t in oil could be extracted, with only $10b profit, and the cleanup costs $15b. But the country received the benefit of $1t-15b.
The country also had to pay the $1t in your example. The actual proper analysis is to measure the difference in consumer surplus between the different points on the supply-and-demand curve hit with versus without the additional production.
So you are saying oil companies are an arm of the government?
I don't know why but a lot of "blind capitalism" reeks of socialism with double standards. After all, if we followed this idea to its conclusion then the US should nationalize the oil industry. Except that isn't capitalism.
Title is misleading. Please change title to original.
Article says the cost to cleanup will be greater than the profit. This is not the total value to the economy, it is the rent extracted by the miners.
Since we all benefit from petroleum fuels, maybe it's wiser to compare cleanup vs total value instead of profit.