The politics of oil are particularly tricky for Democrats, whose chances for victory in next year’s elections can hinge on whether young, climate-focused voters come out in big numbers.
I heard someone say we are at peak oil now or should be soon so this would make sense. Assuming the trend starts going down now…
OPEC+ has been cutting production recently and the US has filled that gap. The reason people presume we hit peak oil soon is basically EVs. Cars make up a huge part of the global oil consumption and replacing them with anything not using oil would change the equation a lot. The other big story is China and the Chinese economy crashing. If that happens we are going to see a massive decrease in emissions very quickly.
Plus Russia isn’t exporting to Europe anymore and the Democrats need to keep gas prices as low as possible because that’s all swing voters care about.
Imagine supporting fascism because gas prices are high, this sort of voter is one of the problems with democracy, it kind of falls apart when people aren’t educated.
And the reason people care about the gas prices is because of the jobs they are forced to drive to instead of remote work. Not mention remote work is a nono just to keep commercial real estate high. So really commercial landowners are the root of this.
Bad urban planning is the cause of this. Going to work can be done on foot, via bicycle or using trains. All of those do not really use oil, if done right.
Yeah but many jobs are at a international level. People do not need to be in office if the people they work with are in another continent. Like customer service for example has no reason to have a call center.
Changing things via broad policy takes a long, long time.
Especially when your broad policy reinforces the status quo.
Petroleum fuel will diminish due to technological, not political reasons. While it’s still valuable, we will still extract it and sell it.
Petroleum fuel will diminish due to technological, not political reasons.
The technology to completely replace it with better options has been available for decades. It’s being kept in use purely for political reasons.
While it’s still valuable, we will still extract it and sell it.
Well, political reasons and blinkered greed reasons. Then again, those are usually one and the same with US politicians, including the Senator from MBNA himself.
The energy density of gasoline is still ridiculous, batteries are getting better but they’re still catching up
There are other options. A lot of petroleum consumption comes from transport and we have electric trains on some scale for a century. That is a really good option to help out with freight transport and a longer distances passenger transport. HSR can even compete with flying fairly well. Proper urban design enables more walking and cycling. Lead based batteries have been used for small trucks for quite some time. It works, but only for very short journeys.
For the rest we have ethanol for example. Brazil did that on a huge scale and developed a special kind of sugar cane, which makes biofuel not all that insane. Oil based chemistry is really just organic chemistry. We can do not with plant based non fossil fuel oils or biogas. Btw biogas and biodiesel are also interesting options, which we have on some scale for a long time.
For replacing oil boilers for heating we have district heating systems using industrial waste heat and things like electrode boilers for a long time. We have had nuclear for decades and hydro is pretty much the oldest type of power station.
Most of these options are bad today, as we have better ones. But getting rid of oil was always possible. Especially with the lower populations we had a few decades ago. It would have been hard work and cost a lot of money though.
Sure, but batteries aren’t killing millions if not tens of millions of people a year and they aren’t the main reason for the planet becoming increasingly uninhabitable and difficult to traverse regardless of fuel source.
When you consider more than just energy density, gasoline looks like the turn of the (20th) century solution it is, whereas more modern ones consider other factors as well.
Like, CO² taxes for oil production?
Why would WaPo use space for that particular divisive article I wonder.
It’s a motherfucking mystery!
He doesn’t have to. There are thousands of stickers on gas pumps all across the country (particularly in red states) praising him for it thanks to the dimwitted MAGA morons. It’s all basically free propaganda for him.
When demands grows, production soon follows. And since Russian oil is no-no, it’s natural that domestic production grows. Given how the effects of pollution are in many ways globalized, it’s completely irrelevant how much oil is produced and consumed in any geographical area. We should be concerned of global production and use.
That’ll happen when other sources are cut off
USA! USA! USA!
