No they're not stop making things up. Most Japanese people and families cannot afford to travel. Wages in japan have not risen since the 90s and have actually gone down with inflation.
It sounds more to do with correlation vs causation people who are more likely to greet others could have a variety of different factors in their lives making them feel less isolated. One of them unironically states that it helps with the Career Wellbeing of an individual which is indicative that it doesn't really do that.
Those aren't NEETs but rather unemployed men unable to continue working often they're construction workers who's bodies give out. Since they are unable to be retrained in the Japanese system they often end up destitute and homeless. Along side recently divorced women unable to re-enter into the workforce it's two issues that are occurring simultaneously. There are some forms of resources for the women but the men are often left abandoned.
Are you replying to the link I posted? One of the summary bullet points: "More than half of young women not employed or in school (54 percent) fall into one of three categories related to disability and potential care obligations — have a disability, live with a disabled adult, or live with at least one of their children — compared to just over one-third of men who are not employed or in school (35 percent)."
The male NEETs in CEPR data were less likely to have a traditionally "good reason" for being a NEET.
NEET men were only slightly more likely to be disabled themselves than NEET women, and given the higher total count of NEET women, I'd guess this breaks out to about an equal number of each gender being NEET for reasons of their own disability.
I agree there does seem to be a disparity in resources for NEETs, though.
Europe never abandoned it's "Elitist Discrimination" instead they build it into the foundations of the education system. It's a different model that instead relies on the fact that for most Europeans their lives are often decided when they born. While most Europeans receive some form secondary education they are pipelined at a young age into roles based on various factors that they are in no control of. It's not better than our existing system but it's not exactly the same.
Instead in the European model while Alumni is not considered, those Alumni have a generational advantage that often makes it so that these children end up in the same place as they were born. In the same way it can be very difficult for children born into lower class families escape from the preset paths in life that they are given.
> While most Europeans receive some form secondary education they are pipelined at a young age into roles based on various factors that they are in no control of
This is simply untrue. It might have been the case a century ago, but is certainly not the case anymore.
It is probably less strict than a century ago, but it is still the case that if you never started or fell off the academic track somewhere, it is very hard or almost impossible to get from the technical track back to the academic track.
This is true in many European countries. But for a kid from a poor family where no one has an academic background and chances of success in higher education are low, a good technical education can still provide significant upward social mobility. If you train to be a competent mechanic, welder, carpenter, mason, electrician, plumber, ... you're set up for a pretty comfortable middle class life. You can even get quite wealthy if you start a business.
I don't think it's necessarily bad that the education system tries to identify students which have low odds of making it in higher education, and offer them an alternative route that results in them having an in-demand skill and some work experience when they graduate at 18 years old.
I'm not at all convinced that an approach where students of all levels are kept in the same classroom is better for the weakest students. I imagine the experience of struggling (and often failing) to keep up every day must be exhausting and demotivating (and perhaps even humiliating). I also have never seem any evidence that such an arrangement is better for weak students in any metric (but I'm happy to change my mind of this if such evidence is provided).
where are you getting that from? i didn't even finish high school and say i wanted to do a masters of computer science at cambridge, all i need is to rush through a 4 year undegrad degree from just about anywhere with an 80% average.
someone who can work 80 hours a week can do that in 10 months or less. especially if you're already an engineer and you're good, it's a breeze.
undergrad is dead simple, it's literally built for teenagers, it's not hard to get back on track.
This doesn't really show much besides the fact that for many European Countries they don't suffer from the same form of income inequality as we do. Note that Japan is ranked 15 yet is one of the worst examples of this. The Social Index tells nothing of the lives of the people in these countries.
In Japan you have to be admitted into a high school program and from their the trajectory of your life starts. All the way into the College process. It's not a fair system yet it's ranked 15.
In Europe, it's easier for someone from the 20th percentile of income to break into the 80th percentile of income. The type of social mobility GP seems to be talking about is escaping the "working class" into the modern equivalent of the aristocratic class (8 figure net worth).
[Citation needed]. Europe is not some monolithic thing. The education systems between the UK, Germany and Russia differ a lot in how early people have to make decisions about their lives, and how stratified the student classes are.
Correct + part of the reason Russia is so fucked up is extreme elitism and a massive gap between the provinces and the 2 gigacities. It's like if NYC and London were dropped in the middle of Kazakhstan, and both groups were raised to hate each other.
That just isn't true in the context of higher education which is what's discussed here. You can still get free higher education in the best universities in Russia regardless of where you were born and raised in the country. There are a lot of problems in Russia and the system of education in Russia, but extreme elitism and exclusivity are not at the top of the list
Also not true in tech. Can't really say anything about other professions, but if you can code you won't have any problems finding a job in Russia. Again, regardless of where in the country you were born
For most jobs real wages haven't gone up at all adjusted with inflation. Others have mostly gone down in wages, most specifically service type jobs which are critical for basic needs. When you can't afford to live why bother?
Sometimes I read these threads and see a lot of parents who seem to think that their child inherently loves something but to me it sort of looks like it's more of a forceful grooming. The word usage of some of the top comments is well very interesting... Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do. Honestly, it's abusive.
Abuse is a strong word. If we keep calling everything abuse then the only thing that would be acceptable is to let the kid do whatever they want. Which kid loves to go to school? So sending them against their "love" to school is forceful grooming?
Children tend to not really be excited for things but show interest because their parents do.
This has not been my experience. My son will tell me clearly he doesn't want to do something, right after I've expressed how fascinating it is and how if he'll just spend a few minutes he'll see for himself.
I'm happy that he finds math interesting. And I'm happy he doesn't feign interest in things he doesn't find interesting.
I feel as though this isn't that surprising when you realize that for most municipalities police forces are revenue generators. Meaning that their main job is in increasing the funding of the precincts they belong to by issuing tickets to traffic violators. You could go a step forward and say they are systemically incentivized to target specific groups due to them being perceived as outsiders but I think a lot of police precincts still enforce broken window theory.
Pretext stops don’t generate ticketing revenue. They’re used in the hopes of finding more serious (by law anyway) crimes once they’re able to get a closer look.
3/4 end with warnings or no action. They’re not pursuing dangerous drivers or fines, they’re pursuing targets they think they can escalate to more serious charges (such as weed possession, in other states anyway)
I always felt that a lot of the aesthetic choices in the cyberpunk genre have been subject to scrutiny as the genre aged. Things like black leather outfits to punk rock. The overall tone of cyberpunk as a genre has always been a favorite of mine. But that it hasn't really changed too much in the decades that came. Instead derivates instead of additions and adjustments to the core cyberpunk genre.
The Cyberdeck itself is well gone a bit off the rails, personally I think a more modern rendition work be more about discreteness it would provide in contrast to a conventional notebook, along with it's utility purposes. But the more modern renditions still heavily favor brick like designs which is fine, sometimes I wish the genre would change. Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it's inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn't have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was. This is getting long but if anyone wants to talk I'm all ears.
Having grown up in that era, I think the "cyberpunk" look is very much tied to the end of the 70's nostalgia for the counter-culture of the 50's (I'd even argue that Punk is the first symptom of that nostalgia; a reaction to the hippie aesthetic and a look back to the postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear.) So cyberpunk as a vibe is a neon Disco veneer atop the inward-looking exhaustion about the failed Space Age, over a substrate of 50's nostalgia. It was a mash up of dated styles from the start, ageless in the way that all postmodern thing are, because it refuses to imagine a "present", it's just a blend of every past moment.
Cyberdecks in particular though, are dated, because they imagined a Present, and came from the mind of an author whose idea of "a machine that creates a consensual hallucination" was the very typewriter he was using to hallucinate the tale. Gibson had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. So his model starts with what he knows, and alludes to the computers of the day: typewriters you plug into your Sony TV. Having read the book in the 80's, I imagined the cyberdeck as being something between an ZX Spectrum and a TI-99. It had that Bertone wedge aesthetic, and was black. A Keyboard with a ROM slot for the Dixie Flatline. Because while Neuromancer was nominally a sci-fi novel, it wasn't imagining anything new in the way that other Big Science space-age authors did. It was a beat-inspired noir novel about demonology and ghosts, that only happened to take place in the future. It was in its own way backward-looking nostalgia.
And that's why I think it's hard to "date" Cyberpunk: it's not so much futurism as it is encompassing the whole 20th century ("Le Vingtième Siècle" if you will...) and placing it in the future context as a way of transposing it for examination.
I don't see any 50s nostalgia or "postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear" in Bladerunner, one of the biggest influences in the cyberpunk aesthetics (even bigger than Neuromancer, who mostly provided language and concepts, not the look).
I do see 40s noir aesthetics, combined with the "rising Japan", "corporatism", and "dystopian future" ideas of the mid-late 70s.
And Gibson wasn't that far off with his Cyberdeck either. 40 years later and hs description is not that different to a Mac Mini, a Raspberry Pi 400, or even, with some minor form adjustments, to the Apple Vision setup.
If anything both our "cyberspace" and machines are still lackluster compared to the imaginations of that era, even with the authors being "soft" sci-fi and not into engineering.
I don't think it's "hard to date" cyberpunk either. It's a distinctive early 80s vision. The reason that it still looks cool, is because we've lost the knack for inventing new visions of the future (or even bold looking industrial design that's not some minimal Braun inspired fare).
Check solarpunk. The wooden aesthetics with curved bezels will come back. No, not heavy and easily-degrading wood, but wooden covers for hardware and a think layer of safe paint with environmentally kind nano-materials.
Also, more than rpi400, we already had cyberdecks in the 90's: Jornada PDA's.
Install NetBSD on them and you have more power than any smartphone in your pocket, which is just an enhanced pocket TV + videocamera + phone blend.
With a proper "cyberdeck", you can write. And if you can write, you can change things, more than resending viral videos making money for anybody else.
> Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it's inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn't have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was
It remains a neat way to get around the display problem, though. Even if most practical work in cyberspace takes place on 2D surfaces, nobody really wants to cart around a pair of 34 inch 4k monitors to work on the go.
This came up while I was playing ShadowRun, a cyberpunk game where decks are wielded by spellcaster-type characters in a way that resembles how wands are used by Harry Potter characters (more or less).
There's something about the way that a laptop screen folds towards you (like it might be part of a maw that consumes you and traps you inside it), and about how the input and output surfaces are so close together that you have to hunch to use it, which makes laptops an unsatisfying form factor for a deck.
Imagine the scene in LOtR where Gandalf says "you shall not pass" to the Balrog. A good deck would fit into that scene without making Gandalf look like a dweeb.
There was all sorts of gameplay reasons also as to why they did it, but in shadowrun's 3e->4e transition they changed the whole decks and hacking from a hardwired matrix where people jack in to a basically... wifi/5g type affair. I always felt it lost part of the strange/cool factor in that move.
If I think along the line of B5's technomages, Gandalf's staff is his cyberdeck. It has everything built into it, with a verbal and touch interface to access it. All he'd need is a small, highly directional speaker built into his cloak or hat, and he'd be set.
"You shall not pass!"
"Initializing scan. Acoustic scan of bridge indicates significant brittleness in materials. Initializing directional vibratory motivators to further destabilize bridge materials."
I would even posit that the modern smart phone meets the requirements as well.
I've seen people walking around defcon with Nreal glass on while they were moving about, so there's still ways of modernizing the styling/ ethos of the original intent.
Yeah that's true. Though usually I see more of a retinal display but that's also more of a times piece sort of thing. Carrying around goggles is also kind of makes you really stand out. Google Glasses were pretty interesting in the early 2010s. Realistically for a netrunner, you aren't even really coding while you're at the location, Mr.Robot does a good job with this but in a different way.
"Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers. This is true for interface hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts in the neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg, already looks slightly quaint. The real cyborg, the global organism, is so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval." -Gibson
That's where things tend to become more complicated. It's dependent on what you're writing and when it's occurring. It's a big leap from retinal displays and discrete leds to full on eyes. Neuroprosthetics especially the Bionic eye are a more complicated. There are biological and technical factors that play a part. Often this is ignored but you kind of can't really do that.
One of the important concepts in cyberpunk, and this applies to the cyberdeck, is the customization of hardware and connectedness between the power user (the jockey) and their gear.
A good cyberdeck isn't clean or new. It's well used, customized, hand repaired.
Which means it has to be customizable and hand repairable. Which (in the common mind) means chunky. Cyberdecks are about a love affair with good tech (full size mechanical keyboard, a trackball, an outdated OS) than slick hardware.
When brand new slick cyberdecks show up in cyberpunk culture they aren't the ones that belong to hackers but signs of a corporate entity. The classic trope is the jockey who takes on a corporate job and discovers his employer is actually a corp because they provide some hot and brand new cyberdeck.
The hacker/jockey/protagonist subverts their culture because they have a personal connection to their tech. It is not disposable, it is loved.
That's why the scene in Johnny Mnemonic when they break into that computer store is so cool. He's got a wish list of gear he knows they will have and that he can use out of the box to do what he needs to do. It shows his competence.
I generally agree with you, even though I have a soft spot for the 80s-inspired aesthetic that cyberpunk refuses to leave behind. Part of its staying power, I think, is because there simply hasn’t been an alternative “tech aesthetic” with as much appeal since. Devices themselves are no longer sculptural forms but just basic slabs of glass. Nor does there seem to be a relationship between computers and fashion style, as there sort of used to be.
This can also probably be placed in context with the general “death of genre” that has happened since the early 2000s.
Personally I don't think Cyberpunk as a genre has died but rather that it had failed to adapt, by the early 00s we weren't as sure as to how technology would progress into the future and many of the existing assumptions they had made were wrong. Publishers were tending to become less interested in continuing it as many parts of the writing world sort of just began to shift to a field of disrepair.
With science fiction as a whole as a genre sort of just wavering off, the problems with writing a systemic whole and how authorship works making it impossible for any progress to really be made. Comic books as well during this period began to waver off sales slumping as progressively all genres have begun to collapse.
I know that several artists and writers are barely even struggling to get by. Essentially being screwed by the industry they had trusted to take care of them. Neil Gaiman talked about it, how he was paid $40 dollars per comic at times. Those rates are still the exact same today, not exactly 40 dollars but not livable. The same happened to Clarke's World and various other science fiction magazines like Asimov. I'd argue the genre did not die, the entire writing community supporting it has died.
> Personally I don't think Cyberpunk as a genre has died but rather that it had failed to adapt, by the early 00s we weren't as sure as to how technology would progress into the future and many of the existing assumptions they had made were wrong.
I think some of it has just moved on. William Gibson's novels from the 2000s are set in the present. There's no Ono Sendai and the Matrix, instead there are iPods, Google, and weird art is discussed in obsucure web forums.
The TV show Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex had a much more updated setting than the original manga. That show has dated quite well since it first aired 20 years ago.
It's true there are but even these examples are in my opinion too small scale. I had hopes with the reboot of Cyberpunk 2077 but it was largely a miss. It had the cybernetics but not anything else. Personally I think that when Cyberpunk is done well it acts as a metacommentary of how our world runs the people that are often left behind and the stories of others.
Communities for this just don't exist. And they won't. The lives of the average writer in every part of the world just hasn't gotten better, you need groups of people working on things, not just experts but people who can interpret and work together on things. And it doesn't exist. A market could exist but there's no one willing to invest in a venture like this, talking about these complex issues and the lives that people live. A living world. Well, I doubt anyone's really interested.
If you do an online search for "cyberpunk", you will notice that Cyberpunk 2077 has nearly made the word synonymous with a video game. This was probably the last stepping stone that made "cyberpunk" fully mainstream.
It appears to me that the word "cyberpunk" is now stuck to mean some kind of entertainment dressed in something from Bladerunner, with a few glowing lines from Tron, riding the remnants of the last 80s retro futurism wave.
In its heyday, cyberpunk as a literary genre was very far from being mainstream. Mostly, because it wasn't easy to get into. A major ingredient of cyberpunk is an ever changing world that has everybody in it on the edge of being overtaken and alienated by technological advance and cultural change. Often the reader would just be dropped into it, get a few paragraphs of background, and then was left to figure out the rest by themselves.
What changed is: Most of it happended and is here now and is also part of our news. You can see people around you being left behind if they don't adapt to smart phones or the internet. It's not an exciting rollercoaster of a novel anymore if the backdrop isn't a hypothetic low-life street hustle but could be set in a major city near you. Or if a documentary on the opioid crisis or tent cities of homeless looks like it could be part of Gibson's Bridge trilogy, but it isn't. It's reality.
In the 70s and 80s, technology was the path to bright utopias. The 90s had an even brighter outlook on the future after the cold war ended. That was the mainstream. Cyberpunk was the edgy punk who told you the near future might not be so bright. Nowadays you won't have anyone argue with that. All of that is mainstream now. It's not edgy anymore. It's just the sad reality.
Anyone who wants to talk about these societal issues needs to find a different vehicle for it. At least by name. "Cyberpunk" is someone's brand now.
I thought CP2077 had lots of interesting character stories, for a video game. Not only were there four or five interesting sidekicks/romantic interests, but several missions and literally hundreds of shards, each a short story.
That's it's problem it never really want any further. It's just a generic rpg game. Which is fine for a lot of people, but it wasn't a world. It didn't feel alive or real. Nothing really connected to each other. It was a linear narrative with a simple set of endings. Don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not anything new or really good. What some of the developers promised was a universe a world that was alive, it wasn't that.
There was no human connection besides in the same NPCs. No real drastic changes and nothing that would necessitate what would immerse you into a cyberpunk world. Just a high budget linear AAA title.
Personally, I think that all the nostolgia with cyberpunk, at least for me, is that I grew up in the 80s and Neuromancer was a formitave book for me... and the thing is, as someone who has helped build the tech world we live in --
"Wouldnt it be cool if" was inspired in me and my ilk that we saw these opportunities in tech, and though "wouldnt it be cool if we did XYZ"
And then, as tech nerds from the 80s - we brought as much sci-fi and cyberpunk as we could to how we built out the technoscape.
While being too young to understand the consequences of "what if"... and thus we have Snowden and Wikileaks, and 100% surveillance state... and now we have FN UAP confirmation in the USG...
Cyberpunk has basically molded modern society even if one may not want to acknowledge it.
I think you have to distinguish between the aesthetic and the themes. The former, is very definitely tied to the '80 and it feel very retro-futuristic today (still cool in its own way).
The themes I think are still relevant today, so much that they are hardly sci-fi anymore.
I think that what makes Cyberpunk appealing has changed over time; it once reflected the concerns of the day, it invited you to reflect about the present and the future looking forward, now it offers solace in familiarity, with the social problems it presented being something that people are used to coping with, it invites you to look into a familiar past.
Back then, it explored the mystery of what the surge of computer technology in daily life meant, and what their makers would become as they grew more powerful. We know how that played out now.
It speculated on what the direction taken by the hegemon of the West, the United States, meant for common people in the future, as it vested itself on the idea that removing fetters on large businesses would deliver boons on the far less powerful, entirely atomized individual. We're well into that now.
The architectural aesthetic was familiar then, more so now. Fear over Japanese investments in the US seem quaint and innocuous, though the wealth transfer from West to East took that was prognosticated was as difficult as portrayed.
That's all forecasting from the state of affairs of the early 80s.
Reading cyberpunk today is done more an act of escapism from the struggles tearing at the seams of society today than exploring current or new ones.
Cyberware and bioware aren't part of the transhumanist experience that cyberpunk primed you for; instead, we have the polemics surrounding the transgender experience, with an intense debate and division on what it means to accept it, going as far as questioning if society should accept it.
Renegades working outside the law aren't clad in anything derived from Punk, that British subculture of rowdy youths espousing familiar ideologies in unsophisticated ways; what we got instead is the aesthetic created by the racial minorities of the US and their feedback loop with the countries of origin of the gangers proper, or their parents, or grandparents, which have more elements that are difficult to deal with for onlookers or people affected by them, from their origin, to consequences, and biases. These people give no space to the rugged individualist, the cartel will demand the submission of individuals to it like a fief, the liberty that the cyberpunk protagonist enjoyed at the margins of society doesn't exist.
A lot of emphasis on neuromamcer was on punk, you know, from cyber punk. 70s punk, dirty, scraggy, poor, filth. This part is omitted in a lot of later Cyberpunk. The cyber part, the internet, was very different envisioned than it turned out to be. Today, cyberpunk is not a vision of a future, but an alternative reality for today. The parts where megacorps are running the world, including militech, resonates, but of course the implementation differences are numerous.
Cyber actually means self-regulating. It comes from the Greek for "good at steering". Cybernetics was the study of self-regulating systems. I'm not sure where computers and high tech got in the picture other than the fact that cybernetics researchers used computers to analyze things.
I think this comment highlights why cyberpunk has fallen by the wayside.
Even in the 80s, the mainstream culture didn’t understand what cyberpunk (or even punk) represented. Now? probably less so.
Cyberpunk chose not to endorse the oppressive system and it’s heroes were not just self reliant but collaborative. The aesthetic said “your cultural ‘ideals’ are not ours. Keep your distance (because that means we are bothered less by you)”. (Cyber)punk is only counter-culture because of the prevalence of the culture around it. Otherwise it would just be an alternate culture on it’s own.
The reason they were labelled “low lives” or criminals is due to the fact that that culture still had to operate within the bounds of western capitalism.
As a thought experiment to everyone (though will this land if you don’t at least have second-hand knowledge of the existing societal problems? I’m not sure): If you choose not to participate in the credit system and don’t already have money, where do you sleep without being called a criminal or a vagrant? How do you feed yourself without having access to tillable land? How do you communicate with others to expand ideas and share resources?
It shouldn’t be a surprise. They’re an oil and gas company, with gigantic investments in that space, a culture that supports it, knowledge to do it, politics solved for it, and a crap ton of inertia.
The expectation that they’d pivot is far less likely than likely. This isn’t a sector known for disruption outside of new ways to extract.
The insane thing about this is to me that Exxon did seem to have ideas about pivoting away from oil and gas in the 1970s[0]. They funded research that brought down the cost of solar panels five-fold and started manufacturing and selling their own panels[1], they developed the lithium-ion battery[2], and they created subsidiaries for servicing the nuclear power industry[3], among other things.
I’ve never understood the obstructionist position of these oil execs. If you want to make a shitload of money, why not push for development of some emerging industry like renewables where all the infrastructure has to be built up from nothing? That could be money you are getting paid to build it. Instead, now it’s money going to some other company.
Despite having all sorts of advantages (a head start and patents for batteries and renewable energy tech, robust research capabilities, etc.) and a literal roadmap of how climate change would play out, they realized that it was easier and less risky--for them, at least--to maintain the status quo. After all, once you've started a revolution, there's no guarantee that you'll keep control of it.
A long, slow transition that started in the 70s would have been, if not painless, then close enough to it that the pain was easily managed. Worries about stranded assets? By the time the transition was over, they'd have been near the end of their expected lifespans anyways. New, more nimble competitors popping up? They could just acquire them.
Lost revenue? Please. They convinced the world not to take action on climate change, and even managed to hoodwink one of the two major political parties in the US that climate change didn't even exist in the first place. Persuading politicians and the public to support mindbogglingly massive federal subsidies to fund the transition away from fossil fuels would have been easy in comparison. And probably cheaper, for that matter.
I mean, my god. I can just imagine the marketing and PR angle: The industry that chose to end itself to save humanity's future. We'd have shoveled money at them, and thanked them for the privilege.
Had they been willing, they could have pushed for an energy transition that, in the end, would have likely been as profitable or even more profitable than what they managed since they first understood just how catastrophic climate change would be. Instead, they chose to merely delay the inevitable. They'll still face the very consequences that scared them off of acting on climate change, only they'll be worse due to the shortened window of action.
The only difference is that the executives who first made that decision will likely not be around for it.
The first digital camera was (AFAIK) made by Kodak. The modern desktop computer was largely invented by Xerox. Both companies failed to follow through.
The idea is to become so big by selling oil that you are essentially paid/begged to create the new industry that solves the problem, thereby giving you first-mover advantage in the new era. The obstructionist stuff is a little bit performative for shareholders, but there will be an inflection point in their public attitudes. Unfortunately it'll be past the inflection point for favorable living conditions.
It’s not an either/or situation. Most of the Big Oil companies have significant investments in renewable power. It’s just that oil is insanely profitable, to a point which is hard to grasp so it dwarfs whatever else they do.
Private oil companies like Exxon are only about 10% of oil production. The biggies are the state oil companies, on which state wealth depends. They aren't going to give that up.
Funny but Exxon could become a ‘net zero’ company without fundamentally changing its business.
You see, companies get charged for the carbon they emit, not the carbon that their customers emit.
An oil refinery is an ideal place to implement carbon capture because it is a concentrated source of emissions and is already using technology such as amine strippers that one would use for carbon capture. Refineries burn a lot of fuel to produce hydrogen and process heat and those could be replaced with green hydrogen or pink hydrogen, heat could be derived from resistive heating, nuclear HTGR or adiabatic compression in turbines. What CO2 is produced can be pumped underground into saline aquifers.
The Biden administration is interested in subsidizing such development in the ‘Refinery Row” of the U.S. South and it is something they are equipped to succeed at because they have the geology, industrial concentration, skills and attitude to pull it off.
A net-zero Exxon would still have to decarbonize production and that is harder than the refinery but they could buy some offsets (or themselves implement with direct carbon capture, BECCS, etc.) It would be a lot cheaper than buying offsets for their customers but who knows they might sell those too.
They'd better be able to get credits for it! It would be pretty awful to charge for emissions whether they emit or not, because then they have no incentive to decrease emissions.
But giving them credits seems pointlessly complicated to me, compared to just saying "no emissions, no charge".
Stop making destruction of the ecosystem an economic externality? What's next, pricing human rights abuses to prevent US companies from profiting off of foreign slave labor?
I think you fail to realize how the profitability of this industry subsidizes a lot of issues that look to be crisises on their own. Plastics being too cheap to make so we don’t really do recycling or reducing to name one.
I find it interesting that people seem to think that storing CO2 under ground under high pressure for an unlimited amount of time is totally fine. "What could possibly go wrong?"
But at the same time somehow storing nuclear waste in specially designed containers sitting inside granite mountains is somehow extremely irresponsible and not an option?
Do most people actually realize what happens when that stored CO2 comes back up for whatever reason in x amount of years (all the way up to 100's of millions of years). I mean both the short term (everything in a certain radius that doesn't fly dies) as well as long term effects.
The irony is that people are forgetting where all that carbon came from in the first place, before plants captured it from the atmosphere!
Humans are contributing to climate change, but the climate had constantly changed throughout history. During the peak to the Roman empire, parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today. The climate cooling is one of the likely contributing factors behind the collapse of the Roman empire, as agricultural output fell as a result.
Climate change is bad for current human settlement and farming, as what is currently primar land for living and farming will change. Such a charge would have dangerous global economic and political consequences.
> parts of the Mediterranean are estimated to have been 2°C hotter than today.
That's not a change in global average tempreture though, that's a local variation.
> but the climate had constantly changed throughout history.
'History' is written history, and no, global climatic parameters haven't changed in written history.
I believe you might be thinking of geological time - and yes, on long time scales climate has changed - and changed with cause just as a stone moves subject to force.
In this particular moment of time climate has started to change within the past century after remaining stable for tens of thousands of years and the root cause of that change is human activity changing the insulation properties of the atmosphere.
There is historical data which suggests that there has been two ice ages in the time of modern humans. The climate only appears to be stable when observed over a short timespan.
I don't think there is any doubt that human activity is contributing to climate change.
It's ironic that modern civilization and population numbers aren't possible without fossil fuels, but their use will ultimately cause it's demise.
Consider that during the first ice age, humans had not left Africa - and during the second ice age, much of North America and Europe were uninhabitable
https://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/Changes_Wage-Workers_Sal...