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Anti-renewable groups have internal disputes over use of misinformation

In the last few months, more states — Washington, Iowa and Kansas — have proposed bills to restrict rural utility-scale wind and solar. In Kansas, these bills were proposed by state Sen. Mike Thompson, who also introduced a bill to shut down existing renewable projects.

Misinformation gets mixed up in decisions over renewable projects

Last year, a Department of Energy study found that setback regulations now represent the single-greatest barrier to securing locations for wind projects in the U.S. Setbacks limit how close wind projects can be to buildings, and Mills says they often make sense to reduce things such as noise and "shadow flicker," the moving shadows and strobing sunlight that turbines can cast onto buildings. But she says misinformation can fuel setbacks that are more stringent than needed and sometimes act as outright bans on renewable energy.

To ensure that the construction of new renewable energy parks does not cause damage to biodiversity, a multitude of studies are taken into account prior to their construction, such as the replanting of flora or the care of species. According to Fernando Ferrando, president of the Renewables Foundation, the negative impacts of renewables on biodiversity are very small.

How can renewable energy have an impact on biodiversity?

Our polling shows that the Green New Deal actually polls very well, even when people consider the potential costs. First, in our election survey last fall, we tested a green-job guarantee, which is a core component of the Green New Deal. The resolution released Thursday proposes “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and disability leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all members of our society.” Mainstream Democratic think tanks have released differing plans on how the government could achieve this goal, though this push has upset some centrists and neoliberals. We asked voters if they would support “giving every unemployed American who wants one a job building energy-efficient infrastructure.” Sixty percent of respondents said they somewhat or strongly support the policy, compared to just 13 percent who somewhat or strongly opposed the policy. (The rest were unsure.) While that idea has broad support, millennials outpace other generations on the question of a green-jobs guarantee

A second hurdle is the fact that many politicians tend to focus on avoiding public blame and reducing the political risks of costly but effective mitigation. Decision-makers often believe that citizens are not willing to pay the price for effective mitigation (Hertel-Fernandez et al. 2019). What is more, many citizens seem to have similar beliefs, and perceive other members of society to be unsupportive of investment into effective mitigation (Mildenberger and Tingley 2017). Political polarization, distrust in science, and populism are on the rise and some people have raised serious doubts about the scientific consensus concerning the severity of climate change and human responsibility for it (Huber et al. 2020). Despite this, the last few years have shown that politicians do not necessarily need to be overly concerned about public backlash against ambitious climate mitigation. Green parties around the world have gained political momentum and recent survey research shows that in countries that are major economic actors like the USA, China, India, Germany, South Africa, and the United Kingdom – a majority of citizens support climate policies with perceptible mitigation costs, for example, policies that significantly increase the price of emission-intensive goods like fossil fuels or meat products (Beiser-McGrath and Bernauer 2019, Fesenfeld et al. 2020, Wicki et al. 2019). These survey results are buttressed by real-world election outcomes.3 Several policy recommendations can be derived from this: First, to generate public support, policymakers should not hide policy costs but communicate to citizens that they are taking their interests seriously, designing policies in a socially fair way, and should explain to people the rationale for adopting ambitious climate policies by creating a “positive climate policy narrative” (Fesenfeld et al. 2021). Second, policymakers should propose effective and feasible climate policy packages that bundle ambitious mitigation measures with policies that compensate mitigation costs for citizens by including clear benefits forthem, and increase the perceived fairness of such policies (Fesenfeld et al. 2020, Wicki et al. 2019). Credible consideration of fairness principles in policy design can effectively reduce the risks of public backlash (Klenert et al. 2018, Beiser-McGrath and Bernauer 2019).4 Bundling social, economic, and climate policies into GND packages that foster job growth in cleaner industries (e.g., the renewable energy industry), increasing social security, and fostering mitigation efforts can help to build broad public support and the popularity of the former among politicians – especially during the COVID-19 crisis (Bergquist et al. 2020). Low interest rates and increasing revenues from carbon taxation also provide governments with the unique opportunity to finance such ambitious GND packages. Third, particularly in the USA, the experience of extreme political polarization and populism is likely to have altered the belief of leading politicians and lobbyists that the cost of political instability is larger than the cost of introducing a GND. While distrust of the scientific consensus about climate change, populism, and political polarization can be hurdles to effective mitigation, in most countries around the world the vast majority of citizens believe in the reality of human-caused climate change (Steg 2018). In essence, policymakers can credibly communicate they are acting in the interest of citizens when they adopt an ambitious GND (Huber et al. 2020, Fesenfeld et al. 2021) The third key hurdle is that powerful incumbent industries show little interest in bearing the cost of mitigation if it is associated with uncertain benefits for themselves. Collective action theory predicts that strong lobby groups of fossil fuel and other pollutant industries prevent effective mitigation because of their ho mogenous interests and significant conflict capacity (for example, Bernauer 2013). However, while I do not contest the basic premises of collective action theory, I argue that its implications for climate policymaking have to be reconsidered. Although powerful incumbent industries, like the meat and coal industry, have long been wellorganized opponents of ambitious climate policy, the situation for at least some of those players has changed dramatically. Not only are powerful industries recognizing the short-term costs and benefits of mitigation, but they also have an increasingly diversified portfolio of products, including clean technologies, to deploy5 . Portfolio diversification lessens companies’ inclination to engage in conflict in relation to lobbying against ambitious climate policies. In fact, portfolio diversification leads to ambiguous lobbying strategies. In this sense, the predictions made by collective action theory can work in favor of a GND. International competition from new market players like Tesla in the automotive industry or Beyond Meat in the food industry are increasingly changing the odds in favor of incumbent actors supporting ambitious climate policies pear unfair, yet realistically, in light of the enormous social cost of a further delay in effective mitigation, but the good news is that both the public and front-running green industry players are willing to bear some transition costs and to compensate losers (Fesenfeld et al. 2020, Wicki et al. 2019, Rinscheid and Wüstenhagen 2019, Beiser-McGrath and Bernauer 2019). Free-riding risks The fourth hurdle to ambitious climate policies, which receives prominent attention in social science literature, is based on global public goods theory. This theory forecasts that successful international cooperation for mitigation is difficult to achieve, given that actors have the incentive to free-ride on the mitigation efforts of others (Nordhaus 2015, Bernauer 2013). However, empirical evidence for this argument is contested and indicates that it is domestic distributional conflict rather than international free-riding concerns that determine national climate policy ambitions (Aklin and Mildenberger 2020). Local and national climate mitigation co-benefits and increasing positive returns from climate mitigation might also reduce the free-rider problem (Hale 2020). Moreover, the “climate club” literature

While the Green New Deal has been a fixture of the post-election news cycle, and at least 40 members of Congress (to date) have endorsed the idea, little is known about the American public’s support for or opposition to it. To inform this question, we surveyed a nationally-representative sample of registered voters in the United States.

In the survey, we showed respondents a brief description of the Green New Deal, which was identical to the first paragraph of this report (above). The description was followed by the question “How much do you support or oppose this idea?”

In early 2022, Data for Progress conducted new polling on a larger group of six core Green New Deal bills with extensive demographic detail. Even with high costs disclosed, every bill has majority support from every demographic polled other than Republicans. That means that men, women, voters over and under 45 all strongly support every bill, as do Black, white, and Latino/a voters, and urban, rural, and suburban voters.  Black voters are by far the biggest proponents of the legislation. They support every core piece of GND legislation by at least +60 percentage points, with an overwhelming average of 78 percent supporting.

In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced the Green New Deal, a landmark resolution outlining the critical steps America should take to tackle the climate crisis, address environmental injustices, and ensure every American has access to a good-paying job. Since the Green New Deal’s introduction, Data for Progress has conducted extensive research and polling on the popularity of the bill and its policy planks.

With Representative Ocasio-Cortez set to reintroduce the Green New Deal resolution in Congress this week, Data for Progress assessed the popularity of the proposal and its policy planks among likely voters in an April 2021 national survey. Two years after the bill’s introduction, Data for Progress finds the Green New Deal resolution and its policy planks still enjoy remarkable support across party lines:

Past presidents have used the bully pulpit to sell and advance their political agendas, often despite resistance from the opposing party. Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the term, used his to rail against corporate monopolies such as Standard Oil and to advance his environmental agenda (as well as some despicable ideas about white supremacy). Ronald Reagan used his reputation as “the great communicator” to push forward his tax cuts and anti-government agenda. Trump turned the presidential megaphone up to eleven, using it to shatter political norms and advance his toxic ideology. 00:54 01:12 President Biden needs to use the Oval Office to advance the bold climate agenda he adopted during his campaign. Climate politics has been transformed over the last year, thanks in large part to youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement and grassroots groups that insisted that climate justice become the centerpiece of Democratic plans to address the crisis. Large parts of the labor movement also got on board, giving credibility to Biden’s claim that when he thought about climate change, he thought about “jobs.” Meanwhile, investors continue to flee fossil fuels as the market shifts toward clean energy. With Biden talking about the climate crisis against a backdrop of wildfires, derechos, and hurricanes, parts of the mainstream media finally got the memo that covering the largest crisis facing humanity should be a top priority. Newspapers made the connection between extreme weather and global warming. Climate change got more time in this year’s presidential and vice presidential debates than ever before, although cable news largely continues to drop the ball. Covering Climate Now How to Stop the Spread of Climate Disinformation ERIKA SEIBER AND MICHAEL KHOO A Soundtrack for the Climate Emergency MARK HERTSGAARD Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for Democrats? MARK HERTSGAARD All this had an impact: Even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, economic crisis, and Trump’s daily tirades, climate remained a top-tier issue for Democratic voters. And large numbers of Republicans also said they were concerned about the crisis. According to a Fox News exit poll on election night, 70 percent of voters supported increased government spending on green and renewable energy. The lesson for the Biden administration should be clear: Keep climate change and the clean-energy revolution in the spotlight. For those of us who spend our lives following politics on Twitter or reading climate stories over coffee, it’s easy to forget that for many people, the benefits of acting on climate are still abstract. Worse, there are plenty of people out there who still embrace the outdated notion that they must choose between jobs and the environment. They don’t know that more people are employed in the clean-energy economy than in fossil fuels. That a Green New Deal could rescue communities that have depended on coal, oil, and gas. That all these changes wouldn’t just save the climate but also make us healthier, safer, and more secure. Current Issue Subscribe today and Save up to $129. Most of the public also don’t know that the fossil fuel industry is working around the clock to stop all these good things from happening. Your daughter’s asthma? Chevron knows the pollution from its refineries makes that worse, but lobbies against regulations to control it. Your Florida city is going underwater? Exxon predicted that, and then spent millions to convince you it wasn’t true. Your pension has dried up and you can’t get your black lung benefits? The coal industry lobbied to get out of those requirements, even as it gave its CEOs a golden parachute. President Biden could bring these issues to the forefront in dramatic ways that build the case for climate action. He could start his term by convening an Environmental Justice Summit at the White House to highlight the ways that Black, brown, and Indigenous people are championing solutions. He could hit the road in an electric sports car and visit clean-energy companies that are creating jobs across the country. He could take a helicopter flight over the Block Island Wind Farm and talk about the potential for offshore wind. He could convene the nation’s governors to talk about how they can set state mandates for 100 percent clean electricity. And he could do all of this and more in partnership with the climate movement, so that as people get interested in these issues, they can plug into grassroots organizing that builds political momentum on the ground. And here’s the thing: None of this requires approval from McConnell. If Republicans maintain control of the Senate and refuse to let a climate bill modeled on the Green New Deal come to the floor, the temptation from some congressional Democrats will be to let the issue die and move on to other topics. This is exactly what advisers like Rahm Emanuel urged President Obama to do back in 2009, leading to years of climate silence from Obama that left the public misinformed and inactive and undercut his administration’s ability to pass strong legislation on Capitol Hill. Instead, Biden and his fellow Democrats should put a bill on McConnell’s desk and then go out across the country and fight for it—and make McConnell and his followers own their opposition to an agenda most Americans support. Climate Politics The Nation Democrats Should Stop Worrying About Debating Climate Change KARTHIK GANAPATHY This barnstorming tour could visit communities being poisoned because Republicans won’t crack down on pollution. It could visit solar companies that could hire more workers if the government would just act. I live in Utah, where we’ve got a growing clean-energy sector—and a senator named Romney who might just be convinced to vote for a stimulus package if local businesses were organized to apply pressure. We all know we’re running out of time to address the climate crisis. There’s no way the climate movement is going to let President Biden get away with just doing a big public relations campaign on climate change; he’s going to have to take action. And we’ll be there to make sure Biden follows through on his promises to stop fossil fuel extraction on public lands and more. But as important as these policy fights will be, the larger political fight is just as critical. Even as we take action on climate, we need to make climate action popular. Biden should use his presidential bully pulpit to do just that.

Furthermore, they argue that the wealth that Western nations currently have could be redistributed globally through global democratic institutions and thus economic growth is not necessary to lift developing countries out of poverty. I definitely agree that there is a massive global inequality of wealth and would be in favor of these democratic redistribution organizations. However, I’m not sure where the political capital for them would come from, especially because it would imply that Western citizens would be much poorer as a consequence and thus likely lobby against them. If there is a theory of change for these institutions, I might be persuaded, but it has not been provided yet. I think massive investments into green energy are more likely to find political capital because they great growth, jobs and wealth rather than redistribute it. Ultimately though, I’m not convinced of the fundamental premise of the strong degrowth movement, namely that economic growth is always linked to climate change and green growth is impossible. The only argument that the website makes is that this has historically been the case. However, they do not engage with the countries in which absolute decoupling has already started, with a transition to service economies or basically any argument for the possibility of green growth. If someone can explain to me why this link necessarily exists or can’t be untethered fast enough, I might be persuaded. Until then, I find the arguments and data for the possibility of green growth more persuasive. Another thing that I do not yet understand is how the strong degrowth movement plans to actually create degrowth. Ultimately, to create localized self-sufficient economies you have to stop or massively reduce global trade, e.g. through large tariffs. This will, with high probability, impact people in growing export-oriented economies such as South East Asia the hardest and keep them in poverty. Since I find it implausible that we can redistribute existing wealth at the scale that would be necessary, reducing economic growth through tariffs probably just makes poor people even poorer. Soft degrowth The second approach I will call soft degrowth. I’m not sure if there is one particular resource that provides a concise summary but the book Prosperity without Growth or The Doughnut economic model might be good starting points. An economy can be optimized for a lot of different metrics. While economic growth is one of them, there are many others such as social cohesion, climate change, pollution, etc. In simplified terms, soft degrowth argues that we currently overoptimize for economic growth while neglecting all the other components. Thus, soft degrowth proposes a reweighing of the different metrics which would deprioritize economic growth. Importantly, they don’t argue that economic growth is bad, just that it’s not imperative and should not be forced at all costs. As a consequence, soft degrowth would argue that the ways in which we currently allow companies to extract resources or pollute the environment for the sake of creating economic growth is wrong and misguided and the latter should thus get more weight in political decision-making. Therefore, it might be possible that the economy could (temporarily) shrink while we sort out the sustainability problems - thus the name soft degrowth. Examples of policy proposals include: a) Companies being held responsible for human rights violations down their production chain. This would weigh another metric, human rights, higher than economic growth and might implicitly lead to a reduction of global GDP. b) Laws that force companies to produce a common good balance sheet, where they have to make public how much they emit and provide certain social information about e.g. their employees. Companies that score high for common good would be subsidized and low scorers would be punished. c) An economy that is built on True Cost Accounting where all external costs are internalized. This is similar to CO2 taxes but for many more aspects such as resource use, land use and potentially social aspects such as future health costs of exploited workers. I think all of these sound like pretty good ideas. But it is hard to accurately approximate these costs and then implement a system that is hard to game for individual companies. In any case, economic growth would probably at least temporarily drop as a consequence since many current products are built on unsustainable practices. If I were to build such a system, I would slowly start to internalize more and more externalizable costs and hope that market forces react to the change and create economic growth while becoming more sustainable in the meantime. I think one could come to similar conclusions with a longterm perspective on economic growth, e.g. to ensure growth in the future, we can’t exploit the planet for fast gains in the present. But overall, I’m sympathetic to many ideas of soft degrowth. The most important distinction between strong and soft degrowth - and why I prefer the latter - is because it acknowledges that economic growth has a lot of benefits and is not in itself bad. Communism Capitalism and Communism are distinct concepts from economic growth, e.g. there can be economic growth within a Communist system. Thus, I personally think arguments along the lines of “Communism would be a solution to climate change because it doesn’t require economic growth” are based on a misunderstanding of the terms. However, the argument is made so often in public discourse, that I feel like I should address it anyway. When people suggest communism as an alternative to solve climate change they can mean very different things. Firstly, they could mean a social democratic system like Norway and mislabel that as communism. Norway is a country with a better social system and cleaner energy mix than most other countries in the world. However, its economic system is very clearly capitalist. The market decides what supply and demand is for the vast majority of goods and not a government planner. So when people mean “the world should be more like Norway”, I’m happy to support them but they then are not embracing communism as a system. Secondly, communism is sometimes used to describe a certain culture or vibe which can include sharing culture, the use of second-hand goods, or demand for fair-trade products. While I’m happy for these people and share this vibe/desire to some extent, it is just not clear why communism would improve it in any way. Within a capitalist system, your desire is translated into demand and someone will provide fair-trade products, found a sharing cycle, or program an online platform for second-hand goods and thereby also contribute to GDP. In a communist society, you have to hope that the people in power actually consider this a problem and target it in their next 5-year planning cycle. I’m not sure why this is more likely to happen than when you create the demand yourself. Lastly, people might argue that the actual economic system of centrally planned economies often found under communist regimes might be a better fit to solve climate change than a mostly free market under capitalism. While I understand the initial intuition of “If we care more about each other, we might actually do something against the climate together”, I think a lot more arguments speak against communism as a solution. First of all, the biggest communist system that we have had so far, the USSR, was much worse for the climate than its capitalist competitor and replacement. The CO2 emissions of Russia decreased 2.5-fold after the collapse of the soviet union while GDP was basically not hit at all. Of course, you could argue that the USSR was just a particularly bad implementation of communism and that a better implementation might solve climate change nonetheless. However, I think communism is systematically less probable to solve climate change than capitalism. In communism, a company has to meet a certain production target. There is little or no reason to improve the efficiency of production as long as the target can be met. Thus it doesn’t matter whether you use coal or wind to power your grid, as long as the energy target is met. If the state gave CO2 targets to combat climate change, there would be no reason to undercut it as you don’t reap the profits. In capitalism, on the other hand, there is always competition for lower prices and thus an incentive to increase the efficiency of production. This means that people are interested in decreasing the energy cost of action because it will improve their profit margins. This, of course, is not a defense of the status quo. Currently, companies have very little incentive to care about climate change because the cost is externalized to future generations. Thus, the key challenge for climate change within a capitalist system is to price these future costs in and align the incentives of companies with those of the broader population. Policy implications After looking at the research and data, I come to the following implications for policymakers. Massive investments into green energy are necessary: As shown in the first part of this post, the rate of decoupling is very proportional to the amount of green energy within a country. When green energy transition is too slow, countries should try to replace coal with gas and nuclear energy since coal is a much worse emitter. Since the clock is ticking, these investments should be massive and much larger than all countries are currently planning. They should be at least as ambitious as the green new deal proposed by AOC, i.e. in the hundreds of billions of dollars. They are probably not only net positive for the environment but also for the economy. They create new jobs in the renewable energy sector and large infrastructure investments such as public transit unlock economic potential by freeing poor people from the necessity to own a car. CO2 taxes and emission trading: The largest reason why the current economy doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions on its own is that the harms are not priced in. The costs are externalized and it is thus rational to emit CO2 whenever it is profit-maximizing.

The idea behind the price cap is to keep Russian oil flowing to the global market, just at lower prices. Russia, however, has threatened to simply stop deliveries to a country or companies that observe the cap. That could take more Russian oil off the market and push prices higher.

That could push costs at the pump higher, too.

Ever since the 1973 energy crisis, economists have attempted to learn how oil (or energy) price disturbances affect the growth of output, employment, productivity and inflation.9 To help answer this question, economists tyypically use models to explain how the economy operates. There are numerous competing models out there, and no one model can account for every last wiggle in the data. That said, one well-known model is a standard aggregate production function framework. In this approach, an economy's output (real GDP) is determined by the quantity and quality of its capital and labor inputs.10 Thus, how fast the economy ultimately grows depends on its rate of investment (increase in capital), its population growth (increase in labor) and its productivity growth (increase in the efficiency of capital and labor arising from technological improvements). Inflation is a product of the money market: An excess supply of money—determined by monetary policy—relative to demand causes inflation to accelerate.

In this simple model, an increase in oil prices reduces the relative efficiency of older capital (machines and equipment); newer capital uses energy more efficiently. Firms react by striving to economize on their use of energy in the production process by scrapping older vintages of capital goods. Thus, capital obsolescence results in less capital available per worker, causing a reduction in labor productivity, a decline in output and an increase in the price level. Although unemployment tends to increase, the fall in the real wage may spur firms to change the mix of their inputs—substituting the relatively less expensive labor for the more expensive capital. For a decrease in oil prices, the effect is just the opposite: Productivity and output increase, while inflation subsides.

An oil price shock is one of several possible disturbances to a country's aggregate price level. Its significance reflects the fact that crude oil is an important energy source for most industrialized countries, who use energy as a direct or indirect input in the production of most goods and services. Because higher oil prices tend to raise the prices of petroleum-based products and alternative sources of energy, such as natural gas, the aggregate price level will rise unless the prices of all other goods and services fall to offset the rise in oil prices. Of course, oil price shocks are not always one-sided. Prices of crude oil can also fall in significant fashion, as they did in 1986 and 1998. On balance, though, the public and policy-makers tend to think of oil price shocks as energy price increases, hence, the adverse connotation.

In the early post-World War II period, the run-up in energy prices prior to economic downturns was comparatively mild. During the four quarters preceding the onset of the 1948-49, 1953-54, 1957-58, 1960-61 and 1969-70 contractions, the relative (real) price of energy increased a little more than 1.5 percent, on average. These increases, however, were tempered by the fact that the relative price of energy actually declined 2.4 percent and 1 percent prior to the 1960-61 and 1969-70 contractions, respectively—though energy prices subsequently rose sharply in the midst of these two recessions.

With rising gas prices now rivaling unemployment as a key issue in this year’s election, both the president and his Republican opponents have been speaking out about what, if anything, should be done. Republicans argue that the nation needs more domestic oil and gas production while the president notes that oil is produced and sold on world markets, meaning that domestic supplies have a small impact on prices. That said, rising gas prices do affect both consumers and the economy adversely, and they are especially harmful to lower- and moderate-income households.

One assumption is that these households do not all own cars, that many use mass transit instead. Looking at all households with annual incomes less than $50,000, it turns out that the vast majority (80%) do own cars, and a significant portion (over a third) own more than one car. Of course, even if they do not own cars, higher gas prices can affect mass transit riders as well once higher costs show up at the fare box, although this undoubtedly occurs with more of a lag.

10. Higher oil prices reflect a need to focus a disproportionate share of investment and resource use inside the oil sector. This makes it increasingly difficult to maintain growth within the oil sector, and acts to reduce growth rates outside the oil sector.

There is a close tie between energy consumption and economic activity because nearly all economic activity requires the use of some type of energy besides human labor.  Oil is the single largest source of energy, and the most expensive. When we look at GDP growth for the world, it is closely aligned with growth in oil consumption and growth in energy consumption in general. In fact, changes in oil and energy growth seem to precede GDP growth, as might be expected if oil and energy use are a cause of world economic growth.

9. Government finances are especially affected by high oil prices.

With higher unemployment rates, governments are faced with paying more unemployment benefits and making more stimulus payments. If there have been many debt defaults (because of more unemployment or because of falling home prices), the government may also need to bail out banks. At the same time, taxes collected from citizens are lower, because of lower employment. A major reason (but not the only reason) for today’s debt problems of the governments of large oil importers, such as US, Japan, and much of Europe, is high oil prices.

7. Business profitability is adversely affected by high oil prices.

Some businesses in discretionary sectors may close their doors completely. Others may lay off workers to get supply and demand back into balance.

6. Housing prices are adversely affected by high oil prices.

If a person is  required to pay more for oil, food, and delivered goods of all sorts, less will be left over for discretionary spending. Buying a new home is one such type of discretionary expenditure.

4. Spikes in oil prices tend to be associated with recessions. 

Economist James Hamilton  thats.

1. It is not just oil prices that rise. The cost of food rises as well, partly because oil is used in many ways in growing and transporting food and partly because of the competition from biofuels for land, sending land prices up. The cost of shipping goods of all types rises, since oil is used in nearly all methods of transports. The cost of materials that are made from oil, such as asphalt and chemical products, also rises. 

If the cost of oil rises, it tends to raise the cost of other fossil fuels. The cost of natural gas extraction tends to rises, since oil is used in natural gas drilling and in transporting water for fracking. Because of an over-supply of natural gas in the US, its sales price is temporarily . This is not a sustainable situation. Higher oil costs also tend to raise the cost of transporting coal to the destination where it is used.