IRS:
I think your summary of the
Microsoft vs IRS article is a bit misleading.
I think the situation is similar to a police department that starts a campaign to bring down drug dealers; they decide the dealers are too well-armed and organized, so just to be safe they'll hire private mercenaries with machine guns and tanks. The mob sees this, freaks out and sends its lawyers to the government; the lawyers argue "Hey, this is completely unprecedented, and we think it's wrong to give a public mandate to a private company, because they don't have the same incentives and approach".
The state eventually agrees, and passes a law that says that police can only hire mercenaries in specific situations, with additional procedures, and also no tanks. So the police can still hire mercenaries and prosecute the dealers, but their effectiveness has been somewhat limited.
(the part about slashing the IRS's budget is where the government really made a giant gift to private corporations, but that's what you get for being in the "Trump gets elected" timeline)
Overall, I don't think this is as strong of a "we live in a cyberpunk world where corporations are stronger than government" signal as you think. Corporate income tax is hard to collect by nature, because it's the kind of tax where it's easiest to respect the letter of the law while evading it in spirit. On the long term, structural changes like the OECD's BEPS or an Europe-led GAFA tax will be more important than enforcement agencies targeting individual frauds.
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Oil:
As I said in the Youtube comments, I went back to notes sent to me by a family member of mine, who works in raw material trading, and specializes in gold and oil. I initially thought you were being pessimistic, and that demand would just start falling as oil prices rose, but a few other articles old the subject told me that, nope, demand keeps increasing no matter what.
One article in particular is terrifying:
Oil prices are truly suspended when the economic recovery is strong: the stronger the recovery, the more prices can rise. But for the time being, US WTI remains around $25.
State of oil demand
Annual oil consumption, after having been expected to rise at the beginning of the year, is now expected to reach 95 million barrels per day, a decrease of 5 million barrels per day compared to 2019.
These figures remain estimates and their likelihood will depend on the duration of the containment with the possibility of a subsequent lockdown, but above all on the strength with which the economy will recover after the reopenings.
As far as the aviation industry is concerned, the recovery will most certainly take time and for this sector, which accounts for 8% of oil consumption, the loss of 6 months of consumption corresponds to a drop of 4 million barrels per day on average over the year.
In China, the recovery in road traffic is at lower levels than before the crisis, with decreases that remain between 30% and 40% compared to normal averages.
The estimate of oil consumption for this year at 95 million barrels per day is reasonable only if activity picks up fairly steadily once the reopenings have taken place. Today, this assumption is possible but it is difficult to know if it is the most likely.
Total announces figures in the red
At the beginning of the week, Total announced a deterioration in its quarterly profits (a 99% drop) but also a reduction in its investments (14 billion dollars in 2020 against 18 billion initially planned), a situation that will most certainly impact the oil industry in the longer term.
Today, the false impression of "swimming in oil", due to the drop in consumption and record stock levels, poses two problems for the periods to come:
Production capacity is being destroyed and some of it will never return to the market.
The decline in investment will accelerate the natural depletion of oil production: as oil is extracted, the pressure in the well decreases and the amount of oil recovered is therefore lower.
In 2015, OPEC estimated that maintaining oil production at a constant level required an investment of $630 billion per year, and to date this has been only $400/450 billion, an amount already insufficient.
Today, the declarations of investment cuts made by Total but also by many shale oil companies could, in the aftermath of the crisis and in the event that the level of oil consumption returns to normal (pre-crisis), lead to a situation where oil production falls short of demand. And this mismatch between supply and demand could lead to a devastating oil crisis for the economy 24 to 36 months after the health crisis, as the oil stocks currently in place could ensure a recovery.
US shale oil: production costs higher than current prices
A recent study by the Kansas Fed indicated that if the price of oil remained below $30, more than 40% of U.S. oil and gas companies would find themselves insolvent within a year.
The shale oil industries, already heavily indebted before the start of the health crisis, having to repay 200 billion dollars over a 5-year horizon, 40 billion of which will be repaid this year, are now facing an impossible situation where, given the low oil prices, the most rational solution would be to reduce their production, which is difficult to achieve in practice.
These industries therefore prefer to cut back on their investments significantly. However, with the specificities of shale oil, whose depletion rate is around 70% after 18 months in a well, stopping drilling necessarily implies a rapid drop in production.
Investments in this sector are dropping enormously, the number of drilling rigs in operation in the United States has collapsed and the number of fracturing teams present on the ground has fallen sharply (300 in 2019 compared to 55 at the last count last week), so shale oil production will inevitably weaken, which will not help the already very complicated financial situation of companies. A number of them have already filed for bankruptcy, including Whiting Petroleum.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
tl;dr: Because of low oil prices these last few years, and because people no longer want to invest in fossil fuels, oil production infrastructure has suffered from a massive lack of investment, which is going to result in a massive hit in production before the end of 2022.
The lockdowns have given us a bit of a buffer while accelerating the long-term trend.
Because oil alternatives are still extremely under-developed, this will result in massive spikes in energy prices, which will bring about a massive economic crisis that will affect all sectors.
This might actually be a good thing on the long term, because this will force everyone to move away from oil dependency the hard way, but on the short term this will result in a whole lot of poverty and unemployment.
... yeah. If y'all have any long-term plans that rely on there being a functioning economy by the end of 2022... well, I'm not saying it's going to be the apocalypse, but start considering backup plans. Remember the early days of the pandemic: the right date to stockpile food and essentials is several months before everyone else realizes there's a crisis.
(I disagree with the "infinite growth is not sustainable in a finite world" school of thought, but that's a different matter)
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Climate change: The situation is slightly less dire than you make it sound.
The way I understand it, we still have some time before we enter an actual climate feedback loop, where global warming melts permafrost which releases gasses which accelerate global warming, etc. Some articles I've read suggest the current deadline is around 2040.
The articles you linked are more about symbolical deadlines, the idea being that "if we don't take strong measures on year X, we're not going to take strong measures on year X+1 and on year X+2, etc". The year 2020 in particular seems like a very decisive year, because we're undergoing a massive economic crisis while climate change awareness is as high as it's ever been, so the decisions we'll take will show how willing we are to commit to climate change mitigation in times where unemployment is high and people are going hungry.
The bad news is, so far signs point towards "not very willing". The covid crisis has seen a high number of countries relax their environmental regulations and develop their fossil fuel infrastructure. It looks like governments are mostly defaulting to "I'll worry about ecology once the economy starts improving", which is... not exactly ideal.
Personally speaking, I don't hold out much hope for political solutions. Technological solutions (hydrogen engines, better electricity production, carbon sinks) might be our only hope.
Olivine weathering in particular looks promising. If it scales well (and evidence suggests that it does), it mostly becomes a question of mining and moving very large quantities of rock worldwide, something our society is particularly good at. We'll need to combine it with global carbon tax schemes so that polluters are the ones who pay to offset the pollution they create, but if we can get that right, net carbon emissions might be reduced to zero decades before even our most optimistic scenarios.
