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?
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.