data/unfunny_text/TEDCC19.txt

And, by the way, we've seen in the tech industry some mass walkouts by employees who are demanding that some of the tech companies do more and get serious. I'm so proud of Apple. Forgive me for parenthetically praising Apple. You know, I'm on the board, but I'm such a big fan of Tim Cook and my colleagues at Apple. It's an example of a tech company that's really doing fantastic things. And there's some others as well. There are others in many industries. But the pressures on the oil and gas companies are quite extraordinary. You know, BP just wrote down 12 and a half billion dollars' worth of oil and gas assets and said that they're never going to see the light of day. Two-thirds of the fossil fuels that have already been discovered cannot be burned and will not be burned. And so that's a big economic risk to the global economy, like the subprime mortgage crisis. We've got 22 trillion dollars of subprime carbon assets, and just yesterday, there was a major report that the fracking industry in the US is seeing now a wave of bankruptcies because the price of the fracked gas and oil has fallen below levels that make them economic.
Is the shorthand of what's happened there that electric cars and electric technologies and solar and so forth have helped drive down the price of oil to the point where huge amounts of the reserves just can't be developed profitably?
Yes, that's it. That's mainly it. The projections for energy sources in the next several years uniformly predict that electricity from wind and solar is going to continue to plummet in price, and therefore using gas or coal to make steam to turn the turbines is just not going to be economical. Similarly, the electrification of the transportation sector is having the same effect.