Anger as BP profits triple to $8.5bn amid soaring household energy bills
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
I had no idea.
Sure, we can eventually switch to Big Electric but then we still have the over centralization and it encourages unsustainability.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_co...
BP just had a $24bn non-cash writedown in Q1[0] due to their stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft. Should the "populace"/government be giving them ~$20bn this quarter to make them whole on their entirely government-created loss?
I'm going to go out on a limb that you're not in favor of that.
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/bp-slumps-to-20-4bn-loss-as-it-bo....
We have people we are hungry and homeless while these corporations get tons of money from the government, same with Intel getting money to build fabs. They have money, they can use theirs but they won't because it would cut into their margins and they can't see past the quarterly profits. Same with the oil companies.
Corporations do not have an inherent right to exist over the people that make them up or the people that make up Amy given country. Corporations need to be able to fail.
> Gazprom paid half the cost of building Nord Stream 2, with the remainder of the $11 billion pipeline project financed by British oil and gas major Shell, Austria's OMV, France's Engie and Germany's Uniper and Wintershall DEA.
There's no British Petroleum investment to "bail out."
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/exclusive-nord-stream...
They're a massive multinational producer. They get to say how much they produce and I've a bridge to sell you if you think they can't conspire with other producers to inflate prices.
These are finite resources with an expensive discovery and extraction. There's no competition to drive the price anywhere but up.
I wish that everyone could get what they want. The people who hate capitalism could transport themselves to an alternate reality where they make the rules and live in the hell of their own creation.
If they could manipulate markets as you seem to imply, they would do it 100% of the time.
If petrol were 10x the current price, you wouldn't commute that distance. You'd move or get a different job.
I don't work in San Francisco because flying there every day would be too expensive, the airlines don't have the ability to force me to pay an infinite amount to them...
This doesn't happen in practice. Instead, people get stuck in poverty traps.
I suspect you mean that people would prefer to spend a lot of money on fuel rather than moving. Maybe they feel that overall moving would be a quality of life decrease.
That's not a trap, it's a preference.
"Just move" or "just get a new job" is great advice for a highly mobile household where the workers have skills in high demand (e.g. young tech workers with no dependents).
For a great many people, "just move" is terrible advice. Moving is financially burdensome, socially disruptive, at times irresponsible, and at other times impossible. Not everyone has the option of just picking up and moving to a place that's more economically viable. They may not have the money to move. They may have obligations tying them to a particular geographical area. There might be legal barriers preventing them from moving.
"Just get a new job" is similarly terrible advice for most workers, for whom a job is not an easily disposable or replaceable thing. It's nice to work in software, where anyone with a reasonable network can organize half a dozen interviews next week with close to no effort. Most people aren't in software, though. A friend with a STEM PhD recently spent 18 months looking for a new job. Now think about people who have less desirable education or skills. "Just get a new job" is not advice that they can act on easily; certainly not quickly in response to rising fuel prices.
I was going to write a long thing here about autonomy and economic circumstances, but I can't really be bothered. In short: people really don't like having their entire lives disrupted, and we shouldn't be building a society that expects that of the average person.
Same if the local grocery stores all closed.
They're not just gonna curl up and die. They might stay and struggle and try to make it work until it's not possible, sure.
You're overcomplicating something that really doesn't need to be. I've been poor, have poor friends, we have autonomy, lol.
Would I? Or would housing costs in densely populated areas also scream upwards? You're thinking about my life on the micro scale, there's a whole forest you're missing for a tree. What happens to the farmers and truckers which the entire economy depends on? Are they just supposed to move or get different jobs too?
The economy relies on price signals. If you just sit about and pay whatever the price is for anything regardless of whether it makes sense to you, then we end up with bad outcomes.
e.g. minimum wage jobs being shit because people do them anyway.
To use your analogy, if the travel was subsidised maybe you would actually take the plane. If the plane company suddenly stops because of strikes, this affects you, not some theoretical shmuck who shouldnt be using planes.
If e.g. a city metro ramped prices then many people in outer zones would have the choice to either pay it, move job, or cycle/walk in.
If they bought a house next to a station with no other good transport links and no local work, well, it's not as if that wasn't known...
You could also get a motorcycle.
The oil companies, as well, would only be slow-walking physical gasoline in hope of future price increases or, for refineries, cheaper inputs. Otherwise, they're missing out on profits by not selling it at current prices.
okay but if oil production is down then at least one of the following must happen:
1. higher prices, which should encourage alternative means of oil production to come online
2. people being priced out of gas and withdrawing their demand
Thinking that everyone can continue to same amount of gas as before is pure fantasy.
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/councils-...
I don't come here for vapid rhetoric games.
> I don't come here for vapid rhetoric games.
One of the principle problems that markets solve is the calculation problem. Billions of people with their subjective and time sensitive needs are making economic decisions and trade offs for themselves, their families, and companies based on their past, present, and predicted future. There is an incredibly complicated dance of price discovery and resource allocation going on constantly. It’s extremely challenging to predict what’s going to happen even at a high level very far in the future due to the vast quantity of inscrutable information. Central planners or regulators who seek to intervene in the market cannot hope to aggregate enough information quickly enough that they can understand in order to intervene without practically assuring negative consequences. The bigger the intervention the worse the consequences tend to be. Intervening in energy markets is going to have big bad consequences. What the consequences are specifically I don’t know but being sure there will be consequences is anything but a vapid rhetorical game.
I can get a text message from my bank within minutes of making a purchase on my debit card at the drugstore. And I know that drugstore's inventory system updates in real time too. Meanwhile, Amazon is building grocery stores that eliminate the need for checkout because their inventory updates at the very moment the consumer picks up the item.
It looks to me like we have all the technology we need to gather and aggregate mind-boggling quantities of information, so unless you have more detail about those challenges, I find the claim they're insurmountable to have the same weight as the claim last century that people could never walk on the moon.
You do also say that the information is inscrutable. I take that to mean that even if we have the information, we either can't process it fast enough or we don't know how to process it at all.
But I'm looking at the history of science and the pace of progress in technology--both theory and practice--and I have to wonder how long that's going to be true. Or, put another way, why should we expect it to be fruitless to explore the application of machine learning to an entire economy? Why does it need to be something sacred that we never question and never dare to answer?
I would like to see the formal description of the problem and the algorithm.
There is a limited resource, and markets are allocating it to those who want it.
If these charities can't keep their lights and heat on then its because people don't find the cause worth donating too. Why aren't you paying their bills? You must not care about the needy at all.
Zero idea what any of this has to do with companies who develop energy resources. The energy doesn't magically come into existence because someone with a sob story wants it.
At this point there is clear harm being done to a large section of society by these companies and the question is what we should do about it.
Capitalism is always tempered in various ways; I don't know if a single case where it's not. "Pure" capitalism would be a dystopian hellhole, and no serious capitalism thinker ever proposed it.
So the question is how and where we should temper capitalism, and more generally how we should implement capitalism. This is not "hating capitalism". That's just red-baiting.
So your comment in itself is wrong. Further you can still take the view that in general companies are free to sell in a free market, while acknowledging specific downsides that arise from that freedom.
In my view BP has done nothing wrong. That doesn't mean I would be against taxing the surplus profits to ameliorate some of the consequences of high oil prices
I would like to know more about what you think of those.
Capitalism is impossible without property rights so assuming you don’t call at least a voluntary system of property rights enforcement “impure” then the very serious scholars like Rothbard, Hoppe, Block etc all proposed it. I’m not sure I agree with them but I don’t think sweeping dismissals or “hellhole” hyperbole are correct either.