Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Anything to do with the traditional world of get a degree, get a job as well as its alternatives
disparatum
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by disparatum »

I sometimes think people's ability to "sleep at night" is partly a function of the absolute magnitude of their ethical decisions. What I'm saying is that most people will never have to make decisions that affect the lives of hundreds or thousands or millions of people. I'm not inclined to call the person more ethical who never puts themselves in a position (or never has the opportunity) to make truly difficult ethical decisions (This is a somewhat weakly held opinion; I might be willing to change it). Or, in another way, its easier to sit on the sidelines and critique other people's decisions.

Shifting gears a little, I don't take much solace in the line of though that "if I'm not pumping the oil then someone else is, so I may as well do it" or, more geneally, "this is such a big problem that I won't have any effect". However, I think the moral calculus is a little fuzzier than you're making it out to be. As some others have mentioned, our entire way of life is predicated on fossil fuel use. Setting aside the fact that one person isn't going to make a difference and assuming that everyone who was or could personally work in the fossil fuel industry could also afford to simply NOT work in that industry, you're talking about a massive and sudden change in the underpinnings of civilization/society and many people on the margin of that society will die. If you argue that this is what we're doing anyway by using fossil fuels just on a different timescale, well which timeline is more ethical? Do people today who depend on fossil fuel use for their survival deserve to die sooner so that future generations can live more sustainably? These are not rhetorical questions.

While I'm only partway through the IPCC report (mostly just the scientific basis so far) and grow increasingly concerned and worried about the future, I can't help but think that frameworks like Land Ethics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_ethic) in the Aldo Leopold fashion are really kind of missing the point. Instability and disruption are a fact of life, on scales large and small. I can't see any intrinsic moral imperative right now to foster sustainability or minimize anthropogenic climate change. Why is man made climate change worse in a moral sense than other naturally occuring change in climate? I certainly understand it from a selfish perspective, but then how many generations in the future should I care about? What's the moral discount rate?

I veered off topic, so I guess in terms of actionable advice, Zalo, I think that maybe you do more good trying to minimize fossil fuel use in your own life and all the lifestyle changes that entails, to serve as an example to others that might know you or come in contact with you (just as jacob seems to have done through this blog) than you do NOT working for a petroleum company. You could obviously do both, but I think the effect of the former overshadows the latter.

Gilberto de Piento
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Gilberto de Piento »

Right now we need that fuel
I really disagree with the above statement. If everyone took on the lifestyle that is continually advocated for on this board (live near work, walk or bike, drive an efficient car, don't waste resources, grow your own food, don't buy goods that don't last, etc.) the amount of energy required would drop dramatically. Cheap oil is mostly a want, not a need.
Your link doesn't address climate change or energy at all.

arrrrgon
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by arrrrgon »

Gilberto de Piento wrote:
Right now we need that fuel
I really disagree with the above statement. If everyone took on the lifestyle that is continually advocated for on this board (live near work, walk or bike, drive an efficient car, don't waste resources, grow your own food, don't buy goods that don't last, etc.) the amount of energy required would drop dramatically. Cheap oil is mostly a want, not a need.
Your link doesn't address climate change or energy at all.

I linked the wrong article apparently. It's fixed now. Thanks.

We could lessen the amount of oil needed, but there is currently no substitute for many of it's applications.

bad_LNIP
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by bad_LNIP »

Zalo-
Just my .02 as a former Army guy, where we do some ethically questionable stuff sometime (such as killing people, destroying stuff, or the really muddy stuff like deciding in 30 seconds if an airstrike/artillery strike to save my guys warrants the risk of collateral damage, thankfully I haven't had to make those kinds of decisions), and I had to get square with that, personally.

I say, from a realist standpoint, you gotta take care of yourself first and someone is going to be a Geologist for big oil, regardless of what you decide, so to me there isn't really an ethical decision as far as the job. Take the money.

Now, how you live your life in other ways may actually have a slight impact. Join the Arbor day foundation, plant a tree for every day you worked, support hybrid cars/renewable energy, etc...
Drilling for oil or gas --> global warming + pollution + deforestation + dead local people (usually minorities with cancer) + lots of $
These are very, very complex things that you are talking about that can't be addressed by the hiring or not of one geologist. Oil/current energy production is so entrenched in everything we do from plastics to energy to industrial uses to manufacturing/farming, you can't get away from it really as things are right now and it takes massive NGO/government/corporate action to change how/why we do things.

You also may find the companies are trying to do things in a good way environmentally.

IlliniDave- I know about wind turbines, I used to work for a company that operated them. They are MASSIVE endeavors and require maintenance crews, construction, cranes, etc...I can't imagine they are anywhere close to carbon neutral and would take years to recover, although they are getting more efficient. Also, wind turbines kill birds...a lot of birds. Although so do tall buildings. :)

I think wave power really might be the ticket if we can get that designed and implemented right.

Did
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Did »

If you can sell your soul for a few years for a fortune, then do it.

The risk is that you lose yourself in that time, and become 'one of them' or get addicted to the cash.

JamesR
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by JamesR »

Can you make the world a better place after the fact?

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Sclass
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Sclass »

Zalo, is this a thought experiment or do you have an offer on the table?

I'm shocked given the state of the industry they'd want anyone in exploration and development right now. Right now you can probably hide out in production and sit tight at a major but geology is the first place they cut in a downturn. I.e. They aren't trying to find new oil.

I worked a stretch at Shell when I was your age. Good pay good benefits. The location was (always is) some armpit of the world that is usually cheap to live in. I recall millionaire next door said a lot of small millionaires are mining geologists because you get good pay and can live cheap in some backwater. The same is prolly true about petroleum geologists. I could have stuck around, got married and bought a home. But I went to grad school instead.

The best ERE job would probably not be working for a major but for a service company where you work in a low tax zone and get hostile territory pay adjustments. (Angola was top paying destination of my day). You work like hell, live in the company compound or your truck, etc.. A buddy of mine did this and saved about $500,000 back in 1985-91. So, yes, this is a great way to ERE fast if you can get the right position. He was a wireline engineer based in Dubai before it was cool to be there.

Ethics...like a few others here I'd say do it. But that is a personal decision. It really depends on who you are and where your boundaries are. I dealt pot to put myself through school. I finessed FDA, CE, UL to get my devices to profitability faster. I made my manufacturing waste go away. But I told a big potential client who made tanks to F off when he wanted to install my device to sniff out people who were trying to hide in bushes. Sorry, that hit the stop.

If I had it all to do over again, I wouldn't have gone to grad school. I would have milked my job at Shell, lived frugally and invested so I could ER as quickly as possible. I would have married my oil town GF and had some kids :| . I would have skipped the whole entrepreneur thing which undoubtedly messed up the world a whole lot more than some litte kid working on a rig.

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fiby41
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by fiby41 »

Different profession (publisher) yet analogous/relevant:
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand wrote: She said:

"That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband’s young mistress is pretty sordid, Gail. But I think there’s something dirtier--the curiosity of the people who like to read about it. And then there’s something dirtier still--the people who pander to that curiosity. Actually, it was that housewife--she has piano legs and such a baggy neck in her pictures--who made this necklace possible. It’s a beautiful necklace. I shall be proud to wear it."

He smiled; the sudden brightness of his eyes had an odd quality of courage.

"That’s one way of looking at it," he said. "There’s another. I like to think that I took the worst refuse of the human spirit--the mind of that housewife and the minds of the people who like to read about her--and I made of it this necklace on your shoulders. I like to think that I was an alchemist capable of performing so great a purification."
Replace:

Murdurous housewife with automobile owners and drivers
curiosity of the people who like to read about it with Oil Inc employees
people who pander to that curiosity with oil corporations
necklace with your financial freedom.

NewReality
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by NewReality »

From reading this thread, it's clear that there is probably no end to the ways in which people can rationalize the means to whatever ends they desire.

Why not just be honest and admit that values are trumped by needs and desires, and ease of doing so is in proportion to the size and social acceptability of the system you employ to meet those desires? (working for the IRS vs. being a burglar)

TopHatFox
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by TopHatFox »

NewReality wrote:From reading this thread, it's clear that there is probably no end to the ways in which people can rationalize the means to whatever ends they desire.

Why not just be honest and admit that values are trumped by needs and desires, and ease of doing so is in proportion to the size and social acceptability of the system you employ to meet those desires? (working for the IRS vs. being a burglar)
I suppose what you write is the reason why climate change and global inequity exist. Some people have a need for extreme wealth and comfort, and are willing to sacrifice the wellness of others to attain it. Likewise, many have a need for perceived convenience, and therefore live inefficiently by ERE standards--to the detriment of future generations and likely themselves. And most probably don't really think about it, likely to meet their need of safety/comfort via ignorance.

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GandK
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by GandK »

Zalo wrote:Likewise, many have a need for perceived convenience, and therefore live inefficiently by ERE standards--to the detriment of future generations and likely themselves. And most probably don't really think about it, likely to meet their need of safety/comfort via ignorance.
I found myself in the black hole of Reddit the other day and ended up reading a comment by a man who was extremely wealthy. He was talking about why he pays for convenience, and (paraphrasing) he said, "Once you have a certain amount of money, how much things cost becomes irrelevant. You're focused 100% on time. You know that's the one thing you can't make more of, and you'd pay almost anything to get more. I don't own a private jet because I'm lazy and don't want to interact with the masses. I own a private jet because the hours I save by doing it are more precious to me than the money I spend. I have enough money. You can never have enough time."

I thought that was an interesting comment/perspective.


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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by jacob »

@Augustus - Somewhere above, disparatum talked about the idea of a moral discount rate. One might define this rate in terms of both time and space. If the moral discount rate in space is high, then one only cares about oneself; as it decreases, one will also care about one's family, friends, ... nation, ... and if the moral discount rate in space is very low, then one might care about people on the other side of the planet to the same degree as oneself.

Similarly, there's a moral discount rate in time. If it's very high, then one will only care about the present... then as the moral discount rate in time decreases, maybe the present generation (next few decades .. or as long as one is alive); as it keeps decreasing, one will start caring about the next generation (the present generation's children), then grand-children, ... and ultimately all future generations of humans.

Incidentally, I think it's quite possible to match people's moral discount rates to political parties.

Doing the math of global warming is illustrative because it affects people both in space (the entire planet) and time (many thousands of years into the future). In particular, it has some physics based constraints that don't care what humans believe about them. It's just a way to calculate consequences fairly accurately, so we can set our discount rates accordingly.

There is a concept called carbon budget. That is the amount of CO2 (in emission tonnes) that can be emitted before a global average minimum temperature increase is locked in with a given probability. Think of it as being similar to if the medical community could calculate how much sugar one could consume over a lifetime before developing diabetes with a 33% probability; a 50% probability; and a 66% probability. E.g. if you ate more than 2500 pounds, you'd get diabetic with a 33% chance; at 3100 pounds, the odds would be 50%; and at 3700 pounds it would be 66%. I'm just making the sugar numbers up. I'm not sure such a calculation can or has been done.

However, the following climate change numbers can and have been calculated. Here they are:

Currently (spring 2018), then insofar we keep emitting CO2 at the current rates, humanity has about 6 months left before we will have used up the remaining carbon budget to avoid a 1.5C rise with a 50% chance. The budget with the 66% chance (of avoiding it) has already been exceeded. (The 33% chance will be exceeded a few years from now.) This means that if we proceed as we currently do with our emission and then stop ALL emissions (driving, heating, cooling, electricity, plastic, fertilizer, ...) around/after September later this year, our chances of avoiding 1.5C are 50%. Of course, us doing that seems highly unlikely at this point---there's not enough time left anymore. If we keep emitting the chances of avoiding 1.5C will decrease and converge on 0% within some years. By 2025, 1.5C will practically be a done deal. To avoid 2C with a 50% chance, we have about 17 years left to implement a zero-emission solution. There's probably not enough time left for that either. I don't have the 3C numbers handy.

The consequences of not fixing 1.5C within the next 6 months or 2C before year 2035 is that people in the future and people further away than the here and now will lead suckier and deadlier lives. For example, 2C would make extreme heatwaves that kill thousands of humans over a few months a regular thing happening every few years ... instead of something that only happens once every few decades. 3C would not be fun at all...but such a point would not be reached before the end of this century anyway... so when/if current babies reach the old age of 82.

This is where the moral discount rates come in. And this is where I'll finally make my point :)

A carbon emission is a carbon emission regardless of whether I (living in the present US) use it fly around the world for fun or to make money or someone in a poor country (in the present) use it to make fertilizer to eat. Here we can use our moral discount rate in space to decide which of us should use that tonne of carbon. Clearly, being able to eat creates more happiness than being able to fly, but if my discount rate is high enough, I would not care about whether other people (further away from me) get to eat.

However, since the budget is finite, if either or both of us use our carbon in the present, it means that people (our children, their children, etc.) will not be able to use it in the future (for flying or eating) INSOFAR they want to avoid increasing death rates all around (the death rates for our generation is fairly safe, but that of those being born now is not).

Clearly, the human capacity to enjoy life is similar between humans living now and humans living in the future, but if my temporal discount rate is high enough, I would not care that future generations would have to suffer for my happiness. Then again, humans have a remarkable capacity for suffering, so .. there's that. Hedonic adaptation and all that.

So that's the moral mathematics of one example of a physically constrained situation.

One could have exactly the same discussion about others things: e.g. charity (to me $1000 makes no difference, but to many it would make a big difference in the life of a poor person, so should I give $1000 away depending on what my discount rate is here... should I similarly give my carbon away so that someone else will enjoy it more than I will or should I just use it myself?), taxes, vaccinations, saving the whales, ...

7Wannabe5
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@jacob:

Wouldn't it be more rational, or practical, at this juncture to simply assume that all easily accessible reserves of petroleum, natural gas, and coal will be used by some human some time in the near future, and then plan accordingly? I mean, otherwise it's kind of like there is a keg of beer at a graduation party in 1984, and Jason is making his 4th attempt at getting some girl drunk enough to go upstairs with him, and his friend Donald has just made the exciting new discovery that 4 mostly empty abandoned cups of beer can be poured together to make 1 full cup of beer, so it's like the GREAT keg will never, ever be empty now!!, and you are trying to talk to them about how the basement toilet is already overflowing with vomit.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I mean, let's assume my actual concern is that future me will feel like cr8p because my great-granddaughter will be looking up at me with sad eyes saying "Why Grandma? Why?" , and current me is willing to go to a great deal of trouble to avoid ending my life on such a down note. Is even being able to honestly convey that I did "my share" to help likely to be adequate, given that I don't believe that it will make a rat's turd of difference in the ultimate outcome? Wouldn't future me be better served by focusing my energies on doing my best to secure a relatively better outcome for myself and those people and the realms in which I do hold or feel specific responsibility for care? Wouldn't this still be true or in alignment with more efficient plan even if my realms of responsibility were randomly, yet SPECIFICALLY (inherent of greater amount of information) assigned? For instance, based on rank of my current personal Emergy rating, World Government Lottery assigns me responsibility for 2050 outcome for myself, a 2 year old poor Bengali state resident named Sadeya, 5 acres of Oak/Pine Climax in Northern Michigan, and all books on the topic of barbed wire design and maintenance copyrighted in the U.S. between 1937 and 1954.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

I just want to point out that Augustus was triggered by something Fox posted 3 years ago because of Stahlmann’s seeming non sequitar.

I love it.

Campitor
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Campitor »

I would say that if you want to work for Exxon you should work for Exxon. They have divisions which are not involved in petroleum extraction. Some of those divisions are developing technologies that either reduce carbon emissions or alternative energy sources. The United States gets 65% of its power from fossil fuels (34% natural gas, 30% coal, 1% petroleum), 20% from nuclear, and 15% from renewable sources.

Renewable energy isn't "clean" either. The constituent items that make up a fuel cell, circuit board, and the renewable energy distribution grid isn't light on environmental impact. Humanity faces, at our current level of technology, hard choices in regards to which poison they feel comfortable releasing into the environment. Maybe your employment at Exxon will be one of many that helps it reduce its negative impact on the globe.

Personally I would like to see more next generation nuclear reactors replacing carbon based fuels as a temporary measure as we transition to and improve renewable energy.

Campitor
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Campitor »

@THF

How to calculate the amount of CO2 sequestered in a tree per year

"The average carbon content is generally 50% of the tree’s total volume.Therefore, to determine the weight of carbon in the tree, multiply the dry weight of the tree by 50%."

Perhaps you can plant trees in your spare time to help offset the carbon footprint you feel guilty about. :lol:

Jason

Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by Jason »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Mar 16, 2018 11:35 am
@jacob:

I mean, otherwise it's kind of like there is a keg of beer at a graduation party in 1984, and Jason is making his 4th attempt at getting some girl drunk enough to go upstairs with him, and his friend Donald has just made the exciting new discovery that 4 mostly empty abandoned cups of beer can be poured together to make 1 full cup of beer, so it's like the GREAT keg will never, ever be empty now!!, and you are trying to talk to them about how the basement toilet is already overflowing with vomit.
His name was Ronald.

TopHatFox
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Re: Loosening ethics for faster ERE--does the end justify the means?

Post by TopHatFox »

Mister Imperceptible wrote:
Fri Mar 16, 2018 11:46 pm
I just want to point out that Augustus was triggered by something Fox posted 3 years ago because of Stahlmann’s seeming non sequitar.

I love it.
Yeah, I don't really care about all this these days :roll: :lol:

I just want a job I can ride my bike to in a sunny place. Maybe throw in some adventure every now and again (y)

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