News roundup, 22 March 2024

- A mass shooting and arson has occurred at a concert hall in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk; at least 40 people have been killed. Ukraine has denied involvement in the attack.

- The US is urging Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries. This is partly motivated by fear that it will lead to massive retaliation, and partly by fear that it will drive up world oil prices and thus American gasoline prices during an election year.

- The Russians are now actually using the W word, which they had previously shunned, for what they previously called their "special military operation" in Ukraine. They claim the reason for the distinction is the (so far indirect) support given to Ukraine by western powers.

- The Biden administration is introducing strict emissions rules for the auto industry, including a target of 56% of new vehicles being electric by 2032. Whether they'll be able to sell this to the masses remains to be seen.

- An article in Time magazine, of all places, acknowledges what many of us have suspected for a long time, namely that leaving things to the private sector and the free market is not going to be enough to adequately address climate change. In fact, some go further and argue that endless economic growth is the real problem - that it won't be possible to "decouple" carbon emissions from economic growth the way many people hope. Rather, they say, a transition to a steady-state economy, as advocated by Herman Daly and others, is necessary. This is a problem, because continued economic growth is integral to capitalism as we know it, and even social democrats are reluctant to question the commitment to growth. On the positive side, though, the prospect of global population decline due to the precipitous drop in birth rates in most countries may help with this - if the population is declining, you can theoretically keep the total GDP constant, or even reduce it, while keeping per capita GDP high. So all the hand-wringing by establishment types about population decline seems badly misplaced, even if the transition will be rough for some.

- Some experts believe that fossil fuel companies could be tried for homicide for deaths resulting from climate change. While this may be theoretically true, it's worth remembering that even in such a blatant case as the Ford Motor Company deliberately selling a car that was more dangerous than it needed to be to save money, the prosecution wasn't able to get a conviction.

- After the Ford government in Ontario scrapped the previous government's basic income pilot study before its scheduled end, participants were unexpectedly left in the lurch. They are now bringing a class action against the government.

- China plans to launch crewed spacecraft using a "railgun" (i.e. a mass driver). The device would electromagnetically accelerate a spaceplane about the size of a narrow-body airliner to supersonic or hypersonic speeds before the craft's rocket engines even fire. Definitely an ambitious idea.

Free market won't deliver alternatives before oil runs out: study

A study by American researchers has concluded that oil will run out long before alternatives are ready:

The world will run out of oil around 100 years before replacement energy sources are available, if oil use and development of new fuels continue at the current pace, a US study warns.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis (UC-Davis) used the current share prices of oil companies and alternative energy companies to predict when replacement fuels will be ready to fill the gap left when oil runs dry.

And the study’s findings weren’t very good for the oil-hungry world.

If the world’s oil reserves were the 1.332 trillion barrels estimated in 2008 and oil consumption stood at 85.22 million barrels a day and growing year-y at 1.3 percent, oil would be depleted by 2041, says the study published online last week by Environmental Science and Technology.

But by plugging current stock market prices into a complex equation, UC-Davis engineering professor Debbie Niemeier and postdoctoral researcher Nataliya Malyshkina calculated that a viable alternative fuel to oil will not be available before the middle of next century.

From the Montreal Gazette. This is unsettling, but when you look at the details it turns out it may not be as bleak as it appears:

On the oil supply side, consumption could well decrease in future as more energy-saving measures are introduced and used by consumers, and new oil reserves could become available as extraction techniques improve.

On the alternative fuel side of the equation, the study did not look at nonprofits, government agencies and universities which are developing new fuels, because they are not quoted on the stock market.

And if governments announced new policy initiatives to promote alternative fuel development, share prices of alternative energy companies would rise, and the gap between the end of oil and the kick-in of alternative fuels would shrink.

So the Gazette's headline is more than a little misleading, but we shouldn't be surprised that they didn't use the title I did; it would be unseemly for a capitalist paper to be too obvious about the shortcomings of capitalism. That said, whether governments and nonprofits will step up to the plate is very much an open question. But there's no reason why it can't be done with sensible government policy.