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California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

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Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#11
post #4

Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

[flagged]

He started the war!

Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#13
post #4

Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

[flagged]

> The President isn't to blame.

I mean, there's a lot of blame to go around, but tearing up a working deal that gave us unprecedented, multilateral access to Iran's nuclear facilities, and then later jumping into a war of choice with no clear objectives and seemingly being surprised by the most obvious geopoltical realities that people with any shred of a clue have been talking about for DECADES would seem to have at least something to do with the current mess.

In my book, the silver lining is that this might finally push the world to move away from fossil fuels in a meaningful way.

Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#14

Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

Surely an example of being ready would be to electrify everything?

Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#15
post #7

[flagged]

How about just ditching this disgusting use of a finite resource and switch to an infinitely abundant resource?

There’s this crazy thing that happens where you need to use carbon to decarbonize.

Solar panels are made in factories where energy and inputs are cheaper and then shipped on diesel cargo ships to the rest of the world.

Our cars run on gas, so we need new electric ones, but the ships and car carriers are themselves… not electric yet.

Because energy is more expensive, everything is more expensive, including electrification.

Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#16

[flagged]

> California leaders have done everything they possibly can to chase refiners out of state The refiners are running out of crude. Having more refiners wouldn’t solve the problem.

There's plenty of crude oil in CA. Certainly enough for California's needs, in fact.

Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#18

Governments have gotten in the bad habit of acting like nothing will ever go wrong. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, so to speak. Cali not the only one suffering this fate. It doesnt matter if it's Trump's fault or not. Lets just say it is. Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

> Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?

It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.

It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.

Re: California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply

#19
post #9

People will blame climate policy on this but this is evidence that we've failed to move off our fossil fuel dependency.

We've had decades to do something about it, but if Trump deciding to step into a completely unnecessary war and blundering the entire thing is what makes everyone wake up then I guess that's a silver lining.
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