After spending three weeks in India and exposing my son to pollution in the name of being sustainable (i.e, not Ubering or Ola-ing every where), I am all the more looking forward to the rapid diffusion of electric cars in our cities. So far I have read reports that cite automakers, oil companies, transportation industry, consumers, investors, and ofcourse, policy makers. However, one group is conspicuous by it's absence from this list, Bankers. There was a time before 2008 when the phrase you can take it to the bank was worth the ink on which it was written but not anymore.
Apropos this criticism is the picture below from a Bloomberg report citing a Bank of America analysis about the future of oil demand.
I am not going to go into issue of peak oil demand for it is not a question of if but when, and I for one feel the when is not as near as it is made out to be but that is another topic. I refer to my earlier post on Peak Oil here.
Here, I really take issue with how two different phenomena -- share of EV sales and global oil demand over the three decades -- are juxtaposed in a misleading way and misinterpreted as an optimistic future when the actual story it tells is a depressing one for the environment! Notice that the primary y-axis (one on the left) runs from 0 through 100% while the secondary y- axis (one the right) runs from 96 to 106 million barrels per day. In other words, the right axis runs from 0 to 8%, which is the decline in oil consumption from it's peak in the late 2020's. What's more, oil demand is unchanged at 0% from 2016 through 2050. Just think about EV's rise to a 100% of car sales in 30 years time and oil consumption has not dropped one bit. This chart is not one you can take to the bank. For the sake of our own future let us hope that this projection is wrong.
May be I am being too harsh as this post is about bank analysts, a subset within those large institutions who perhaps are more guilty than the rest of their ilk for all that is wrong with them. Unfortunately, one might find such misleading graphics in academic and scholarly journals as well, which was the point of my 2016 paper on "Peak Cropland". I argue, albeit using correlations only, that global crop acreage is set to keep growing.
Apropos this criticism is the picture below from a Bloomberg report citing a Bank of America analysis about the future of oil demand.
I am not going to go into issue of peak oil demand for it is not a question of if but when, and I for one feel the when is not as near as it is made out to be but that is another topic. I refer to my earlier post on Peak Oil here.
Here, I really take issue with how two different phenomena -- share of EV sales and global oil demand over the three decades -- are juxtaposed in a misleading way and misinterpreted as an optimistic future when the actual story it tells is a depressing one for the environment! Notice that the primary y-axis (one on the left) runs from 0 through 100% while the secondary y- axis (one the right) runs from 96 to 106 million barrels per day. In other words, the right axis runs from 0 to 8%, which is the decline in oil consumption from it's peak in the late 2020's. What's more, oil demand is unchanged at 0% from 2016 through 2050. Just think about EV's rise to a 100% of car sales in 30 years time and oil consumption has not dropped one bit. This chart is not one you can take to the bank. For the sake of our own future let us hope that this projection is wrong.
May be I am being too harsh as this post is about bank analysts, a subset within those large institutions who perhaps are more guilty than the rest of their ilk for all that is wrong with them. Unfortunately, one might find such misleading graphics in academic and scholarly journals as well, which was the point of my 2016 paper on "Peak Cropland". I argue, albeit using correlations only, that global crop acreage is set to keep growing.
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