China is going hard on nuclear power, and i imagine they’ll get to a point in the next decade or 2 where they have all their domestic energy needs met by a combination of nuclear, renewables, and a bit of russian oil imports/iranian oil imports. They clearly want to be capable of standing on their own without imports from the west. Doing a single month like this is a great test to see which areas still need improved on.
Also i know we don’t mention it much, but this isn’t just about war. There are some experts who suspect we already hit geological peak oil. In 2018 specifically. That is when over half of all recoverable oil has been drilled for already.
If they are right about that, and there are some signs they might be, oil prices are going to keep going up, and up, and up. People will say it’s inflation until it isnt ignorable anymore. The only countries who survive that are ones who can transition to other energy sources. China is basically the only major country that would be able to do it fast enough.
We will see. There have been predictions about peak oil before but then new technologies unlocked previously inaccessible deposits. So i don’t have a really good feel for how long exactly they can keep kicking this particular can down the road. It may be longer than we think.
The real impetus for change is going to have to also be political, not just purely economic. Driven by the increasingly undeniable reality of climate change rather than price inflation, since prices can be manipulated in a lot of ways by governments and by cartels like OPEC.
Of course it also helps that renewable technologies are rapidly becoming more economically appealing while fossil fuels are getting more expensive, but i think that leaning too much into the notion that change has to be driven by economic considerations is not such a great idea.
Because that leaves the door open to the possibility that if somehow the problems of prices and scarcity weren’t there then we wouldn’t need to ditch fossil fuels. But even if fossil fuels were endless and free, we would still need to transition away from them asap.
Well that’s the thing. New technologies unlocked new deposits that we couldnt access before, but the price to extract it kept going up. There will always be more oil somewhere the issue just becomes if it’s economical to get to it. So far since 2018 we’ve seen no new discoveries or breakthroughs that could prop it up longer. It seems like it’s on the decline now. Even if we find a way to get more hard to access oil zones the cost will be even higher. So nations that are reliant on oil become more and more economically fragile over time.
China is going hard on nuclear power, and i imagine they’ll get to a point in the next decade or 2 where they have all their domestic energy needs met by a combination of nuclear, renewables, and a bit of russian oil imports/iranian oil imports. They clearly want to be capable of standing on their own without imports from the west. Doing a single month like this is a great test to see which areas still need improved on.
Also i know we don’t mention it much, but this isn’t just about war. There are some experts who suspect we already hit geological peak oil. In 2018 specifically. That is when over half of all recoverable oil has been drilled for already.
If they are right about that, and there are some signs they might be, oil prices are going to keep going up, and up, and up. People will say it’s inflation until it isnt ignorable anymore. The only countries who survive that are ones who can transition to other energy sources. China is basically the only major country that would be able to do it fast enough.
It’s going to give them the edge in AI
We will see. There have been predictions about peak oil before but then new technologies unlocked previously inaccessible deposits. So i don’t have a really good feel for how long exactly they can keep kicking this particular can down the road. It may be longer than we think.
The real impetus for change is going to have to also be political, not just purely economic. Driven by the increasingly undeniable reality of climate change rather than price inflation, since prices can be manipulated in a lot of ways by governments and by cartels like OPEC.
Of course it also helps that renewable technologies are rapidly becoming more economically appealing while fossil fuels are getting more expensive, but i think that leaning too much into the notion that change has to be driven by economic considerations is not such a great idea.
Because that leaves the door open to the possibility that if somehow the problems of prices and scarcity weren’t there then we wouldn’t need to ditch fossil fuels. But even if fossil fuels were endless and free, we would still need to transition away from them asap.
Well that’s the thing. New technologies unlocked new deposits that we couldnt access before, but the price to extract it kept going up. There will always be more oil somewhere the issue just becomes if it’s economical to get to it. So far since 2018 we’ve seen no new discoveries or breakthroughs that could prop it up longer. It seems like it’s on the decline now. Even if we find a way to get more hard to access oil zones the cost will be even higher. So nations that are reliant on oil become more and more economically fragile over time.