Have you ever wondered what the beginning of the end of the oil era looks like? Look around, we are living in it!
This is a good collapse in many ways, except the resistance to it is driving genuinely bad collapse like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the US’s attempts to villainize and go to war with Venezuela. It used to all come back to oil, now it all comes back to having a secure, defendable way to make sure you can still sell your oil uninterrupted.
-The Moment The Music Stops In Oil Company Musical Chairs- would be my caption for this moment in history
The question is which collapse do we get? The collapse of fossil fuels or the collapse of everything else?
"Oversupply’ is the oil market way of saying “demand cratered”.
Because the US, and thus world, is entering into a 2nd Great Depression, possibly more like a Great Reset, into neofeudal corporatocracy, aka, cyberpunk world.
But uh, oil and gas ain’t going anywhere so long as we need chemical fertilizers for food… which, unless you’re ok with like, 4 billion people dying off in the next decade or two, then yeah, we’re still gonna need oil.
Which I hate, by the way.
I just genuienly do not see how you do a ‘total fossil fuel collapse’ without a uh, ‘oversupply of starving people.’
Note, I am not saying that we are going to stop using fossil fuels anytime soon. That isn’t my point, my point is that oil used to be more important than literally anything else and you could accrue any amount of power you wanted through owning the access, refinement and sale of it.
Oil is now super valuable, but especially since China has invested so heavily into Electric Vehicles and alternative energy in general, it no longer has a complete dominance over geopolitics. Oil no longer equals economy, it is now simply just a very valuable fuel and chemical engineering/manufacturing input.
What we are seeing now isn’t the collapse of oil being valuable, it is the collapse of oil utterly determining the trajectory of international geopolitics to the exclusion of other concerns. You can build a massive economy with alternative energy and batteries now and that changes power relationships all over the world in the short term and long term. Even though this process doesn’t spell the end of heavy fossil fuel use I do think of it as the collapse of the fossil fuel paradigm in some sense. The problems of fossil fuel use don’t go away with that collapse though, that is definitely true, this is only a baby step towards addressing that.
Oh.
Well that’s a completely reasonable take, imo.
Oil and Gas will generally, globally, become realtively less overwhelming dominant, yeah still vital, but as you say, not necessarily the top dog.
But, the counter to that is… they have an ungodly amount of institutional inertia and connections, that deeply embed them into so many important government and societal systems.
What I’m trying to say is… imagine if the US just poof no more subsidies to O&G companies.
Perhaps ironically, that’s how you actually get a total collapse, fairly quickly.
Which… is why they won’t totally collapse, and why it will be difficult to dislodge them from carve outs and special programs, tax rebates, it will be hard to out lobby them, out corruption them.
… Maybe something like that will be our real world analog to the First Corporate Wars? Played out via PMCs, financial trickery, boardroom ‘actionable death threats’, etc?
Armored Core
This is a compelling narrative, but it’s not real.
PDF Summary of China’s energy and power sector statistics in 2024 https://usercontent.one/wp/www.cet.energy/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-03-CET_Summary-of-Chinas-energy-and-power-sector-statistics-in-2024.pdf?media=1741852733
Check the actual numbers. Fossil fuels are 80% of china’s primary energy. Hydro is 10%.
All other renewables including wind, solar, biomass etc are a mere 10%.
I don’t think the evidence you provide disputes my point, my point doesn’t rest on batteries and electric vehicles necessarily replacing fossil fuels wholesale all at once in the near term. The EV revolution doesn’t have to do that to destabilize the world oil markets because the world oil markets are exceedingly fragile and prone to violent outbreaks.
Your criticism of China feels like a distraction or that it at least heavily missing the point, ok so China uses fossil fuels, their investment into alternative energy and Electric Vehicles cannot be ignored however in the possible futures it gestures to where major economies don’t have to indefinitely rely on fossil fuels.
They are also doing a hell of a lot better than the “West” and I think that is honestly putting the “West” into a bit of a panic where the impulse is to cut China down rather than try harder at green energy investments and it is an ugly look on Western powers that the rest of the world is taking note of…
Pure myth. Sorry.
Current world economies have not decoupled from fossil fuels. Not in China, not anywhere. Neither in terms of current output nor in terms of delivering future growth expectations.
Nobody is going to pave a single road in any conceivable future for EV vehicles without humungous amounts of asphalt and diesel.
Thinking about these fantastical science fiction futures is pure denial of what is happening in reality.
EVs and “alternative green energies” are an amazing idea under two conditions.
Condition 1 is that you reach full roll-out globally before the year 1990, before existential climate change is permanently baked into the cake.
Condition 2 is that you stay in the realm of “story” and never show the math. Then its very reassuring and people don’t become unruly.
I’ll just go a little further and say that I would find it very challenging to come up with a cogent theory of geopolitics (taking into account Russia/Ukraine, USA/Venezuela, Israel / Gaza) etc that doesn’t revolve around future oil supply becoming desperate in terms of outlook.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-shadow-fleet-sanctions-china-coast-2013815
There is currently a “shadow” fleet of 180 oil tankers shuttling Russian oil into China. Bypassing the international sanctions to deliver below market crude to China. Completely at odds with the idea that China can just fab up some solar panels to replace crude at will. We don’t see that happening at all.
It is just simple physics that makes EVs and alternative energy competitive, not feel good handwaving like you suggest.
Also you are simplifying my argument to make it easier to dismiss, I am suggesting the beginning of a decoupling, not the overnight arrival of some magical tech that whisks away fossil fuels in one flourish.
How much time do you think we have, that focussing on “the beginning of decoupling” is actually meaningful? Especially since that is a move that should have been done decades ago? And how many scientists need to say we’ve blown it when it comes to emissions reductions getting us out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into?
I just started watching a video with David Suzuki that addresses your point in the first 5 minutes: “In 2018 the IPCC…came out with a special report that said look, we must not allow temperatures to rise more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels…This is a critical point, after 1.5 degrees rise we can’t predict what’s going to happen but it’s going to be climate chaos…We passed 1.5 degrees in 2025…After 29 (COP) meetings, are we not ready to say " eh, it doesn’t work”?..Is it too late? Of course it’s too late! But what’ll we do? You know, people are saying every 0.1 degree matters, we got to keep working. But wait a minute now, we’ve had 29 COP meetings to try and limit it. At what point do you say it ain’t working, it doesn’t work that way…we’re still not operating as if we’re in an emergency"
If feeling positive about the “beginning of decoupling” helps you cope, good. But people addressing the reality that eclipses that are saying we will have at least 2C warming unless we implement geoengineering.
I think you misunderstand me, I believe the EV revolution is inveitable because the maintenance and fuel cost advantages of Electric Vehicles will categorically curbstop Internal Combustion Engine cars on a practical basis. That doesn’t mean I think environmentally that EVs will proliferate fast enough to stop catastrophic climate change.
The thing is before fossil fuel powers could claim practical EVs are a pipedream and impractical, now it is just plain factually incorrect when they do so. The proof is in the pudding and China by and large made that pudding.
Ah, it sounds like I have misunderstood you, although I think my question still stands with a bit of a different context–how much time do you think we have? Because, unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by EV revolution, it requires a long enough runway of climate, economic, energy, and social stability with sufficient material resources for infrastructure building and production.
As an aside, it makes me sad that the conversation is never that we should move away from cars and invest in public transportation. I know that you’re not comparing EVs to that, and I think there isn’t a sufficient runway for that either. But since I’m wistfully thinking of the things we should have done in decades past I decided to include it.
We are NOT in the second great depression. I know we aren’t. I’m too young to count and know the real number and so is literally everyone else that’s alive.
If you try to argue with me, I don’t care because you clearly don’t understand what math is; no matter how well you can finagle numbers. Also, Mani Mani ain’t real. No matter how much or long you think it is, I guarantee you won’t have a soul left though. You should get better boots, BTW.
Uh, no fucking clue if that was all a joke or reference I’m not getting, but uh, yes, I agree.
I do need better boots.
Earthbound.
Bates - With a zipper on the inside
Humour never not present. Even when you think you know. So if not, be sure keep your mind open and perceive it. Usually it’s outside your dimension, so not a consequential inference. So best to not sweat potential implications but don’t ever close your eyes to what must always be viable. Even when you think you get it.
Humour is invariable the most necessary cognitive means to enlarging one mental capacity. It is the only way to break all barriers on understanding.
If you can gain that capacity, even Lovecraft’s “horror” can do what he gave viable a path to anyone who chose to learn enough.
Cthulhu is like Thanos. When you do figure it out, you can realize those Villains as the “good.”
Loki is, indeed, a key. Got to that first episode of the second season and literally every scene was a to the point spot on explanation of everything I saw on DXM+Salvia Divinorum. The latter a pointless chaos, and the former a meaningless translation. Together they were exactly everything Loki revealed in that one episode. Season 1 was a base to understand that episode’s context for revelation of, the rest afterward was arbitrary plot for that & details enamoured for context, and, of course, humour.
Ask a Juggalo.
You know, I’ve done hallucinogens before, Salvia was one of them, I’ve also had a psychotic break before, and I’m fairly sure you’re having one right now.
Not judging, no point in that, just saying… maybe take it a little bit slower than you currently are.
If somebody called in a wellness check on you right now,you’d end up in an involuntary, temporary hold, if you’re thinking/talking like this in real life, if this isn’t you doing a bit.
Like, I do actually mostly understand what you’re saying in this comment, you’re doing a bunch of very higher order/level abstractions and comparisons, that most people can only do at very, very simple/basic levels, syntactically, and I do follow most of them, but the problem is that if I lack the level of base knowledge of the things you are referencing, comparing…
Well, then it sounds more or less insane, especially to a normie, especially to mental health professionals.
Because the shared context doesn’t exist, the comparisons seem nonsensical, but because you also wield the comparisons with confidence, this is interpreted as mania, a manic episode, psychosis, something like that.
Please do be careful.
Salvia is not a hallucinogen. Hallucinogen is like “Addiction” and “Money.” None of them are real. They may be a meaningful direction to talk about similar observations but one must be clear that these are not real things, mostly because you don’t know what you’re perceiving. On a fair point though, on the two comparisons I throw on to a similarity knocking point, at least there’s enough basic logic I could reasonably establish there void of existence.
If you’re attending that basic notion, consider dividing them from any perspective that aren’t the one’s given for such to be done. Then substantiate their existence in anything other than a person’s belief.
Let me know if you find any basic logic establishing any reality to any of those four things.
Anyway, back to my original point on Salvia Divinorum. Salvia is like a Liquid Kaleidoscope. It’ll make no sense and do nothing more than scramble all perceptions you have with any other perceptions, and most likely, with perceptions you didn’t know you have. Furthermore, until you acknowledge the existence of perceptions you didn’t know you have, even DXM can’t translate for you.
I could tell about my experiences from decades ago, years ago. I could describe the difference of those experiences with and without the translator (DXM). I don’t think I will unless you can be open to the base of considering the means of the reasons, logic, perception, illusion, allusion, purpose and, well, infinite dimensions and more.
I don’t think you understand what it means to be Just Sayan. I know I don’t but I think I can gather more than you are handling understanding of. Learning to Understand is an infinite path. Consider that. I’m not trying to tell you what what. I don’t really care what you think what what is. That’s pointless because it’s a distraction. Communication is a structure that must be built. Stories are great reference points, like bricks, when building.
I wouldn’t even be this far in a response if I didn’t think you would. I do know that you can.
That is, quite pointedly, exactly my active project. Establishing a sort of communication means that even I lack any real words to describe let alone name or any much more than allude to incompletely. I don’t need you but I do need someone. Many of which have been met.
Anyway, Tell me you don’t think Heath Ledger’s Joker wasn’t the real Hero. Then try to define Psychosis for me. Also, stop Drinking MiKelobe ULTRA.
I’d apologize, but I don’t know what it mean to do that upon this. I no longer understand what “careful” means anymore. I analyzed the word til it fell apart and nothing remains like fear.