[Graeme]

What a win-win on unburnable carbon looks like

John Fullerton, president of the Capital Institute, working with the Carbon Tracker Initiative and other data sources, estimated the approximate value of that unburnable carbon in the neighborhood of $20 trillion. This is an order of magnitude estimate to illustrate the choice: You can have a livable climate or you can have your old economic engine, but you cannot have both.

Many observers believe unburnable carbon is the real obstacle to progress on climate change. To stay within planetary limits with a simple cap on emissions would mean destroying trillions of dollars of the market value of publicly traded and state-owned enterprises woven deeply into the fabric of our retirement systems and global security calculations. They also wield extraordinary power because of their earnings, giving them trillions of reasons to fight.

What if there was another option? What if there was a way to get oil and gas out of combustion and preserve the lion’s share of their asset valuation? There is.

Call it the Feedstock Shift: Instead of burning hydrocarbons, we build with them. Oil and gas contain some of the most sophisticated polymers available in bulk and our society has chosen to burn most of them. With the rest, approximately 18 percent currently, we make plastics, carbon fiber, 3D printing “ink" and advanced fabrics — essential elements of our global economy for which demand only will increase.

However, given the industry’s current business model and its hard-wired market for fuels, natural demographic increase in demand for materials will not be sufficient to attract all the petroleum and gas products we cannot burn to stay within the necessary 1.5 degrees of warming.

To do that, we will need to make a conscious, aggressive shift, not unlike the one Winston Churchill executed when he shifted the Royal Navy from coal to oil: Britain was not at risk of running out of coal; rather, oil offered strategically superior characteristics and important advantages that Britain wanted to exploit. Today the United States and the major economies have a similar strategic opportunity. Executing the Feedstock Shift removes the primary political obstacle to dealing with climate change and minimizes the risk of market shocks, while removing oil and gas as a geopolitical Achilles' heel for the world’s major economies. For the United States, Europe, Japan, China and India, all facing different combinations of climate and energy security issues, this is only a crisis or two away from being a strategic no-brainer.

greenbiz

[Keith_McClary]

What a win-win on unburnable carbon looks like
greenbiz

The part following your quote seems to be the core of his proposal:

Back here at home, the policy pathway is straightforward. Instead of a cap-and-trade system or the simple, more aggressive carbon tax, a Feedstock Shift policy would make fossil fuels too expensive to burn and very attractive to make things with. The key is introducing a policy that creates sufficient space in the materials sector to allow oil and gas reserves to be valued above the price at which the Middle East blows up and below the price at which fracking makes sense, in effect leaving a strategic material reserve in the ground for future generations.

What price is "too expensive to burn" and "below the price at which fracking makes sense"?

[Graeme]

Good question. The author doesn't offer such a single fixed price but what he does say is this:

The final policy package likely will include a price on carbon, a price on non-municipal water withdrawals and a price on ecosystem services, especially forests.

[GHung]

"To stay within planetary limits with a simple cap on emissions would mean destroying trillions of dollars of the market value of publicly traded and state-owned enterprises

".

Maybe I'm missing something, but that carbon equates to energy that economies need for growth. The true value is in the burning. Fiat carbon?

[jedrider]

"To stay within planetary limits with a simple cap on emissions would mean destroying trillions of dollars of the market value of publicly traded and state-owned enterprises

".

Maybe I'm missing something, but that carbon equates to energy that economies need for growth. The true value is in the burning. Fiat carbon?

Yes, you are missing on the concept of the 'perpetual motion' machine that will 'convert' all this feedstock to useful products, basically a 'perpetual 3D printer' that can save the industrial world

[Graeme]

This is the second time I've held out an olive leaf to the oil patch. This was the first. In both cases, I didn't get a single response. Why?

I think you are missing the point of this thread. There are a number of ways to use hydrocarbons besides burning them. This is one way out of this impasse where everybody wins. The oil patch can make higher-quality hydrocarbon end products without harming the environment. What so wrong with that?

[steam_cannon]

I think you are missing the point of this thread. There are a number of ways to use hydrocarbons besides burning them. This is one way out of this impasse where everybody wins. The oil patch can make higher-quality hydrocarbon end products without harming the environment. What so wrong with that?

I think I get the point of the thread, but it's not an easy thing to push. I think most people here know it's a crime of our generation to burn hydrocarbons instead of reserving them for chemical feed-stocks. It's an awful waste. Kunstler talks about that a lot. People are really good at wasting high quality resources. Before we started pumping oil from the ground, New England was almost treeless just a few hundred years ago, now trees are back everywhere. Unfortunately hydrocarbons and metals don't grow on trees so we're really screwing ourselves in the long term even if we do shift to alternatives.

But even knowing that, no one expects we can force people to change that behavior without better alternatives in the market. The best we can do is to pressure the oil companies to stop blocking alternative energy like how they keep pushing for laws against selling electric cars. Nobody is fooled that "it's just the individual franchises" pushing against electric. And even their best arguments like "the electric grid can't handle electric cars" is BS, hooking up car batteries most of the day with peak hour feedback would even out and improve grid power balancing and lower average costs instead of spiking them. Vehicle to grid is already being done. But oil companies would rather tear up the tracks again.

This is the second time I've held out an olive leaf to the oil patch. This was the first. In both cases, I didn't get a single response. Why?

Olive branch/leaf? I don't know, did something happen? I'd guesses that just nobody liked the article or the description needed clarification or nobody was awake or were at work when it was posted. I've posted plenty of articles on things I find to be market changing that though interesting weren't really personally important enough to generate a discussion. Actually looking at the link you provided, my first thought is the description could use some tweaking.