Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Guardian author Owen Jones, Extinction Rebellion aren’t being radical enough; demanding large scale nationalisation is the only way to stop an ongoing rise in oil production.
How to stop climate change? Nationalise the oil companies
Owen JonesFri 26 Apr 2019 03.35 AEST
If only the Daily Express was right. That is not a sentence I ever expected to type. “Extinction Rebellion protests have WORKED as MPs succumb to calls for change”, bellowed the rightwing rag. Alas, the government has not capitulated to demands to declare a climate emergency, let alone to decarbonise the British economy by 2025. But Extinction Rebellion has retaught a lesson every generation must learn: that civil disobedience works. Amid the spluttering of obnoxious news presenters, it has forced the existential threat of climate change on to the airwaves and into newsprint.
But as this phase of protest winds down, the demands must radicalise. With capitalism itself rightly being challenged, the focus must shift to the fossil fuel companies and the banks. As long as they remain under private ownership on a global scale, humanity’s future will be threatened.
Take ExxonMobil, which plans to pump an astonishing 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than it did in 2017.
…
So long as these sectors remain in private hands, they will continue to place short-term profit for elite investors ahead of the future of the planet and continued existence of humanity. They must be brought under public ownership, with a legal mandate to “green” the economy. One suggestion by the Next System Project is that the US government could create a community ownership of power administration, modelled on Roosevelt-era New Deal agencies. It would grant legal authority and funding mechanisms to buy back the energy grid and take over energy utilities.
But there are more radical solutions. Since the crash, quantitative easing (QE) has been used extensively, with central banks creating money to buy bonds from financial institutions. Why not use QE to buy a controlling stake in the fossil fuel companies? It has been estimated that the US has spent nearly $6tn on its post-9/11 wars. If it has the resources to engage in catastrophic wars, could it not afford to pay a small fraction of that sum to help save the planet from destruction? The same goes for the banks – except rather than nationalising the risks and privatising the profit, as the state did in 2008, they should this time be brought under democratic, accountable public control.…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/climate-change-oil-companies-extinction-rebellion
Owen Jones is right that nationalisation would cause oil production to plummet, though not for the reason he thinks.
Part of the reason the Venezuelan economy cratered is they nationalised their oil industry. They replaced competent private sector managers with incompetent political cronies.
Anyone looked at The Guardian’s luxury Holiday page and it’s tech page, affluent hypocrites.
Nationalizing oil companies will not change
that demand</strike the fact (reality) that it is not possible using 'green' energy (wind and sun gathering) to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions to less than around 50%.The problem is battery storage is required when the amount of intermittent power reaches around 40% of total grid average load.
The CO2 reducing ability of 'green' energy is fundamentally limited by engineering constraints which start to appear as the amount of 'green' intermittent energy reaches around 20% of grid total.
Ignoring engineering reality is pathetic.
An example of reality ignoring is not including the requirement for new power lines and power equipment to transmit the new green intermittent energy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Renewable Energy Does Not Work
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
Another try at a comment without the strike through.
Nationalizing oil companies will not change the fact (reality) that it is not possible using ‘green’ energy (wind and sun gathering) to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions to less than around 50%.
The problem is battery storage is required when the amount of intermittent power reaches around 40% of total grid average load.
The CO2 reducing ability of ‘green’ energy is fundamentally limited by engineering constraints which start to appear as the amount of ‘green’ intermittent energy reaches around 20% of grid total.
Ignoring engineering reality is pathetic.
An example of reality ignoring is not including the requirement for new power lines and power equipment to transmit the new green intermittent energy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
Renewable Energy Does Not Work
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
Nationalised oil companies are the most successful.
Look at Saudi Arabia for instance.
Not so sure the term ‘nationalised’ works for the Saudis. Seems more like undisguised private ownership by the royal family.
Look at Mexico and Venezuela for counter-examples AND the Soviet oil industry before a half-hearted privatization
Next the Guardian will push using Brawndo to water crops because it has electrolytes.
Seemed to work pretty well in Venezuela. Oil production tanked after the industry was nationalized. Great idea, Owen, you twit.
The Garada will wither and die unless a socialist government props it up as their mouthpiece .
The demand for most goods and services is driven by demand from the general population .
The oil companies are no difference selling petrol and diesel than a pop star selling seats at a concert.
If there is no demand they soon stop doing what they are doing .
Socialists do not grasp this very simple fact.
For example New Zealand has to export to the world to survive and it the world does not require our goods we soon hit hard times as a country .
Fossil fuels ARE required in every country in the world and calling on governments to nationalize the oil industries and restrict oil production is absolute madness and can only ruin the countries that attempt this socialist suicide.
Even in our country our socialist Prime Minister has decreed that no more offshore oil exploration licenses will be issued while her government is in power.
She did this to alert the world that she and her government were serious about climate change .
All that it will do is to increase our imports of oil from other countries and restrict or close down industries that rely on natural gas as our oil and gas fields run down .
Indirectly we will have to mine and use more coal as the natural gas shortage occurs.
Decarbonise the British economy by 2025? I look forward to Extinction Rebellion taking their protests to China and Russia – they may very well become extinct very quickly.
The Graudian is a Block Op run by the Deep State, the Western Military-Industrial Complex and Big Carbon. Its aim is force even the most slime green eco-com into realising they are sooo stoooopid.
The Guardian should be shut down and their offices boarded up in the interest of the security of the UK. I am serious
“It must really suck to feel a need to act that stupid”
Exxon didn’t produce 25% more oil because they were evil, they did it because of a whole bunch of really bad people provided a demand for it. You know like farmers to plant, fertilize, and harvest food, truckers to haul it to market, mom’s to go the the market to buy it and take it home and cook it…bad actors all. Don’t you really want to get rid of at least half of these “bad actors” to save the planet?
These forthright calls for the socialization of Western Society will be the death knell of the Left. The recent phenomena of the Left outting itself as blatant socialists shows that conservative voices have been correct all along — the supposed “green” movement has just been international socialism with a coat of green paint.
There were the same calls for a massive change in government-types back in the anti-war movement in the US — recall the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Do not be fooled by the fairly conservative public statements from proponents — which mostly demand nationalization of energy resources — the Left’s plans are to entirely socialize the West with the power in the hands of a small group of elites — graduates of the Ivy League schools in the US and Oxford/Cambridge in the UK, where socialism has been being trained into vulnerable young minds since the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century. (If this sounds familiar, think of the Soviet Union or modern China).