TIL there's a known massive oil reserve in antarctica discovered only earlier this year (2024)

From the unicellular algae *

It’s much older than dinos.

So fuck peguins I guess

Well, this is how a large part of how carbon credits “work”. You can pay someone to not cut down their tree, for example, and get a certificate in return. However, the demand for wood will likely just get satisfied elsewhere and there is little stopping people from selling multiple carbon credits per tree, or just including trees that would not get cut down anyway.

In the best case scenario, actual carbon gets stored so that it won’t decompose (like dead trees or other biomass in oxygen, maybe even plastic someday) or burned (like coal that future people can reach); however, that’s energy-intensive (hydrocarbons release energy when turned into oxides and vice versa) and difficult. Obviously, such carbon credits are expensive and they would probably cost an airline as much as fuel for your flight. Sealing an oil reservoir instead of using it, as I suggest, would be the easiest way to effectively accomplish this but oil producers don’t want to miss out on the fields they operate.
Unless the “carbon neutral” option for your flight ticket is a large percentage of its price, they are probably using dubious carbon credits - in the typical case, they are like saying your crypto mining rig is zero-emission because it’s next to an existing hydroelectric dam. The energy from that could have been used to offset some carbon-intensive production elsewhere (unless all your energy demand is already satisfied by clean electricity and you cannot export, like Iceland some islands).
At worst, it’s a pure scam that offsets no carbon and is pushed by Big Oil to prevent buyers from considering systemic changes to their carbon-heavy operation.

Edit: Iceand indeed has an overproduction of clean energy and they use it to extract and export aluminum, which is energy-intensive. Still, as long as there are gas furnaces and combustion engines on the island, there is room for improvement. However, small tropical islands (which cannot host aluminum factories) mostly use solar panels and some storage solution, and computationally heavy tasks are a legitimate use for any excess electricity production.

I don’t know man, in the US people pay insurance companies money to have access to life saving medications like insulin. So in a way we pay people so we don’t die from medical neglect… which could be considered negligent homicide depending on how you argue it.

This sort of bullshit is normalized in the US. I dont like that our country operates like the mafia, but here we are.

Is that not what mugging usually is?

The black penguins and the white penguins are getting along a little too well, they need some social media

Googling says 36.4 billion barrels per year as of 2018, so 14 years.

That kind of calc isn’t fair though because there’s a ton of protection everywhere else.

[Trump pulls out a sharpie and starts circling the wrong part of the map]

“I AM PLACING TARIFFS ON PENGUINS UNTIL THEY GIVE US THEIR OIL AND SHOW ME HOW TO DO ALL THE DANCE MOVES FROM HAPPY FEET!”

This totally isn’t a war crime

Robert M. Gates:

Very legal. Very cool.

And America never breaks agreements!

fallout

Maybe that’s the last place we’ll have oil after everything else is drained? Or maybe some contract expiring that year