71–80 of 88 posts
Are they wrong? I would say they're right, oil is in fact vital to global security.
Cheap and abundant energy is strongly correlated with prosperity. Every barrel of oil produces roughly 1,700 kWh of thermal energy. In countries with low cost of oil production like Saudi Arabia and Iran, that means electricity generation for less than $0.01/kWh. The only viable technology to compete with oil and gas over the long term is Nuclear.
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As of now, fossil fuel is crucial for national security. The whole economy runs on fossil fuel. But fossil fuel has 2 main drawbacks: 1. Contribute to global warming 2. It takes millions of years to produce, and few days to consume (aka limited resource) So, we need to adapt the economy to those 2 drawbacks. Even if one thinks that global warming is not an issue, then the fact that it is a limited resource is going t…
National security or global security just means it’s necessary to maintain the status quo. If needed, in sure we could get off oil in a matter of a decade or less, but it’s just easier to use oil and not work so hard to get off of it. You don’t have to explain how we’re dependent on oil to me, anyways, dependencies being a national security threat is a failure of political leadership for decades and decades now. We s…
I would be less optimistic as 80% of the energy used is fossil fuel (source: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...).
Everything that we wear (plastic) or eat (fertilizers, and farming, trucking) comes from fossil fuel. Oil is everywhere. It is going to take a while to withdraw from our addiction.
> We should have been off oil in the 80s or 90s after the crisis in the 70s...
Oil is a fr(e)aking miracle. It is virtually free (just drill), it is energy dense, easy to transport, it makes fertilizers which allowed to fed the planet with less fields, it makes plastic, etc.
The countries fortunate enough to have some in their underground, have a natural printing money machine.
But, it is a limited resource, and using it at the scale we have been doing in the past 100 years, is impacting the environment.
> but instead we just paid off powerful men in the Middle East with weapons and kicked the can.
I agree that we kept kicking the can. But fortunately (or unfortunately if we are not prepared) it will eventually come to an end. It takes million of years to produce oil, and we consume it faster and faster. There will a time, where we would not find the easy oil, and it would become more and more expensive to find. If we are not prepared, then chaos will follow (wars as the last countries that have access to oil will keep it for them, economies will collapse as worldwide trade will break, etc.)
Clearly the past 100 years have been golden thanks to oil. We need to build a future where oil would be less abundant and more expensive.
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Yes. Without oil dependence, the US can let the Middle East sink back into the sand. That's going to happen eventually anyway.
The US hasn't been dependent on Middle East crude oil for some years. We still maintain security guarantees there to support key allies, and contain hostile foreign powers, but that will gradually fade away as part of the foreign policy pivot to Asia. European countries need to get moving on rebuilding expeditionary military forces in order to ensure reliable energy supplies (the notion that they can quickly transiti…
people really don't get it.
All the more reason to not need oil anymore.
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Yes. Without oil dependence, the US can let the Middle East sink back into the sand. That's going to happen eventually anyway.
The US hasn't been dependent on Middle East crude oil for some years. We still maintain security guarantees there to support key allies, and contain hostile foreign powers, but that will gradually fade away as part of the foreign policy pivot to Asia. European countries need to get moving on rebuilding expeditionary military forces in order to ensure reliable energy supplies (the notion that they can quickly transiti…
Think how far along we would have been had Reagan not been a contrarian asshole who took brand new solar panels off the whitehouse just because. The man signed off on he SuperConducting-SuperCollider because he understood how valuable science investment was, then promptly ignored that for national energy policy because his friends preferred to get rich.
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The US hasn't been dependent on Middle East crude oil for some years. We still maintain security guarantees there to support key allies, and contain hostile foreign powers, but that will gradually fade away as part of the foreign policy pivot to Asia. European countries need to get moving on rebuilding expeditionary military forces in order to ensure reliable energy supplies (the notion that they can quickly transiti…
and frankly the more poorly informed western elites try to protest and prevent extraction and distribution of western (i.e. Canada, USA) oil and gas, the more dependent we will all be on oil from places like Saudi and Russia. people really don't get it.
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... I mean to I guess that is -- without oil we'd have an order of magnitude less food and no means of waging war at scale. So the world would be more "secure" in the sense that we probably couldn't wage war across the globe. That said, we'd be starving and far more isolated.
I think I roughly guess if you're using electrolyticly generated hydrogen to make ammonia it'd take about 10kwh/kg of electricity. If you can get wholesale renuabes at $0.05/kwh that'd be about $0.50/kg energy cost. Wholesale ammonia prices are about $0.30/kg. A lot of that wholesale price is natural gas. You can see the relation here. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=52358 If you dig at industry press…
Tractors run on diesel fuel, the trucks that move the grain run on diesel, the trains typically run on diesel, the ships typically run on diesel. The plant that processes it into food runs on coal or natural gas, or possibly some hydro power or nuclear. The bag that stores the food comes from natural gas (sometimes oil). Then that package is shipped to a store using diesel. The store powers its lights (also made from a polymer from natural gas) via natural gas generators.
One of fertilizers you point out is ammonia comes as a product from natural gas & it's the only current viable way to do it commercially, at scale.
Sure one day, we may replace all these components, but in-reality it's not anywhere close to being replaced.
I think the opposite -- that oil is one of the larger factors that endangers global security.
And change tautologically does endanger the status quo. So proceeding with business as usual with perhaps a slow gradual shift would always be seen as the safe choice, and rapidly abandoning oil would be perceived as dangerous, no matter what harm or risks oil is causing.
One thing is true: U.S. natural gas production was critical for EU survival after Russian gas cuts and is still critical for survival of EU support for Ukraine. If not the increase in U.S. supplies, EU won't hold out for long having to buy gas elsewhere as prices won't at all be affordable. I don't think it makes sense intentionally suppressing fossil fuels production. The way renewables are developing now, they'll s…
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> Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion in 2022 or 7.1 percent of GDP.... Differences between efficient prices and retail fuel prices are large and pervasive, for example, 80 percent of global coal consumption was priced at below half of its efficient level in 2022. [1] Fossil fuels will die a lot quicker if we stop subsiding them to the tune of 7% of global GDP, i.e. 7% of all economic activity globally i…
> fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion in 2022 Nearly all of that "subsidy" is the lack of taxation of the negative externalities of fossil fuels. Even fossil fuel propaganda isn't this disingenuous with the way it frames things. That's like saying that fossil fuels are under-subsidized by trillions of dollars because they are used to power hospitals and can be used to power hospitals in Africa.
> fossil fuels are under-subsidized by trillions of dollars because they are used to power hospitals
Nope. Governments/patients pay hospitals for their services, then hospitals pay power companies the market price for their services.