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America’s Energy Security Is Falling Apart
- credit_guy 5y ago> Unlike the government of nearly every other major oil-producing country, including Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC states, the U.S. government cannot open and close its own oil taps. It cannot compel oil companies to drill more. Yes, the US Government can't dictate the oil companies what to do. That's the point of this country. Sure, if absolutely necessarily, the President could invoke the Defense Production Act. But we should resist this type of urge. Fortunately, nobody needs to "compel" the oil companies to drill more when the barrel sells for more than $100. They will be more than happy to oblige.
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoMy new favorite site comes to the rescue again: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec-fossil-nuclear-renewables?country=~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/elec-fossil-nuclear-renew... We can see the % of energy generated by fossil fuels has dropped from 71% in 2000 to 60% in 2020. Absolute scale, 105TWh produced via renewables+nuclear in 2000 to 328TWh in 2020. For comparison, the entirety of Russia uses 200TWh of energy. China uses 366TWh. So the US added an entire Russia worth of renewable energy in 20 years. The reason the politicians repeat the same messages is because changing the entire energy mix of a massive country is a decades long project no matter how you do it. The numbers do not paint a story of failure to me.