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?
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