8 ms·

A core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end: This war seems more than likely to drive up oil price

• 1minusp 7mo ago
  I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.
  • brightball 7mo ago
    Economics will always win in the end. At the rate that costs are dropping for solar, it should just be a matter of time. Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.
    • bdangubic 7mo ago
      > Economics will always win in the end. This may have been true in the past but the economics of today is "whether this is good for 1% of the population" and not in general, yes? If I can buy cheap solar panels from China (or say for the sake of argument someone "friendlier" like Germany) but that gets slapped with tariffs or other means the "administration" (bought by the 1% crowd) has at their disposal to prevent this from happening. If we lived in a free market this would be true for sure but we don't (by we I mean USA :) )
    • JanisErdmanis 7mo ago
      The remaining oil companies will profit tremendously from the high oil prices. I am sure they will have no problem allocating some of those extra profits to sabotage attempts to consider any alternative energy sources.
    • gottorf 7mo ago
      > Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather. And energy storage, and peaking, and matching demand to supply at the grid level. None of which are included in the usual "costs" of solar.
  • JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy A longer view of history shows a clear pattern: "After a gasoline price shock, households respond in the short run mostly by reducing travel, although estimates from the literature suggest the response in the short run is quite low (e.g., Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling 2006). Over long horizons, households adjust their vehicle technology and reduce further their consumption of gasoline. ... The market share of full-size pickups, utility vehicles, and vans fell more than 15 percentage points between its peak in 2004 and early 2009. Small cars and the new cross-utility vehicle segment picked up most of this market share" [1]. [1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086%2F657541#_i21 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086%2F657541#...
  • tolciho 7mo ago
    It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.
    • ryandrake 7mo ago
      I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.
• lxgr 7mo ago
  > Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. If your sovereign territory happens to support them geographically. This is true for many, but not all countries. Also, without large storage capacity, you might end up being self-sufficient during sunny, windy days, but find yourself very dependent on your neighbor countries for imports on overcast days or at night without wind. The combination of all of this is especially unfortunate for hydro, where you're pretty much fully dependent on the geography you've been handed. So I'd say the self-sufficiency story of renewables doesn't fully hold. They benefit from regional cooperation and trade just as much as fossil fuels, if not more. (In my view, that's not really a counterargument, but it does raise the importance of having a well-integrated, cross-border grid even more.)
  • dalyons 7mo ago
    Why do you have to go to absolutes? If 90% of countries can be 80+% self sufficient, that’s still an amazing thing
    • lxgr 7mo ago
      If you're 80% self-sufficient, you're not self-sufficient.
      • ViewTrick1002 7mo ago
        But the dependency turns from a stop the world calamity to an annoyance. If you’re 95% self sufficient it will stay at headlines in the local press.
        • lxgr 7mo ago
          Losing 20% of your electricity supply is a calamity, not an annoyance. So unless you want the calamity, you're still dependent on imports. Personally, I don't see an issue with that, as long as the neighboring countries you're importing from are reliable and will be able to supply at the times you need (i.e., they don't have the same possibly spiky import dependency as yourself). The other option is massive storage capacity. I just don't think it makes sense to just equate renewables with automatic sovereignty.
• Tadpole9181 7mo ago
  The US just gave away a billion dollars to NOT build renewable energy.
• skybrian 7mo ago
  It will be a boost for renewables, but hardly the end for natural gas. Keep in mind that while ~20% of natural gas was supplied via the Persian Gulf, that means 80% was not. I expect that batteries will eventually solve the day-night cycle for solar, but for seasonal storage, natural gas is much easier to store, so this still looks to me like a mix of energy technologies, with renewables getting a larger share.
• weaksauce 7mo ago
  this misses the fact that petroleum is incredibly useful outside of the burn it to make electricity and burn it to make car move use cases.
  • estearum 7mo ago
    Not really. Needing 1MM barrels gives you a lot more independence than needing 100MM.
  • bikelang 7mo ago
    All the more reason to not squander a finite, precious resource to generate electricity.
  • amarant 7mo ago
    Not really. If we only need it for petrochemical products, like medical plastics etc, losing 20% of available crude globally is a non-issue. We can probably stand to use a lot less plastics too. Outside of medicine it's mostly replaceable, and reducing our usage to less than 80% of current usage would be trivial if we didn't burn it for energy. In that scenario Iran can keep their strait. We won't need them.
  • triceratops 7mo ago
    So don't use it for cars. It's strictly optional these days.
• lambdasquirrel 7mo ago
  There are still processes that we haven’t replaced petroleum for, like Haber-Bosch. China has already banned the export of fertilizer for this reason.
  • zahlman 7mo ago
    Sure. And petroleum not burned for energy then becomes petroleum available for those processes. I don't understand why so many people are raising an objection here when this should be a clear win-win.
• ericmay 7mo ago
  Self-sufficiency is a myth. Even if you wanted to try and be energy independent, for the short and medium term (and maybe longer, who knows?) you will be dependent on China and all the baggage that they bring because of their dominance of rare earth mineral processing. Need a new solar panel? Don't make a certain country mad (whether that's your local Ayatollah or CCP official). And that's just energy. What about pharmaceuticals? Financial markets? Who protects your shipping lanes? Who builds your semiconductors? Where do those factories get their energy from? I support the diversity of energy sources because they all have strengths and weaknesses. We've got to figure out climate change. But we also can't have, even if you want to somehow "move off of oil" a single country run by lunatics who can decide whenever they don't get their way that they get to seize 20% of the global oil supply. We can't have China dominating rare earth processing either. For some others it may be a reliance on American military technology.
  • estearum 7mo ago
    I don't think they said it will give you self-sufficiency, rather that it removes one (important) dimension of dependency.
    • ericmay 7mo ago
      It doesn't though, it's the illusion of removing of a dependency which is rather dangerous. You're not only swapping one dependency for another in this specific case, but you're ignoring the rest of the global economy and its own dependencies and how they affect you.
      • littlestymaar 7mo ago
        You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest. When Russia invades Ukraine or Iran cuts the straight of Ormuz energy prize go up instantly, chocking the entire world economy in the course of a few weeks. Even if China stops exporting rare earths, it would take years before it affects the energy market. It's absolutely incomparable. Cuba is a good example by the way: a country can survive for decades while being cut from most technology import due to sanctions, but if you cut its access to oil, it becomes dirty real quick. And because Cuba has been stuck in the middle of the 20th century, it's actually much less dependent on energy than most developed or even developing countries.
• buran77 7mo ago
  The petrochemical industry is huge we've yet to find alternatives for it. Half the stuff around you was made with something derived from oil, and you can't replace that with wind or sunlight in the foreseeable future.
  • all2 7mo ago
    We should also note that wind turbines require huge amounts of petroleum derivatives to operate.
    • nullpoint420 7mo ago
      Yeah but at least the byproducts produce a solid that can last for years vs treating it as a consumable. I'm fulling expecting someone will reply to me and say that making plastic wastes 75% of the oil or something during production, and that it's just as wasteful amortized across the lifespan of a wind turbine. I'm tired, man.
      • leonidasrup 7mo ago
        You can compare material intensity of different electricity generation technologies. https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electricity-generation https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr... According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
        • triceratops 7mo ago
          You can recycle the minerals so it will also fall back down to almost 0 on a longer timescale. If you keep burning gas you will never stop mining.
          • 7mo ago
• laurex 7mo ago
  It's very helpful to understand energy density to evaluate what a shift to renewables actually entails or what is even possible. Vaclav Smil is a good source or for a less dense version Nate Hagens has podcasts about it.
• Forgeties79 7mo ago
  For the US to start going that route we need a certain group of politicians to stop telling everybody that windmills are killing whales and birds en masse, claiming solar "isn't there yet" (somehow it never is), and that there is such thing as "clean coal." Literally the only thing I don't hear them fighting (loudly) against is hydro power.
  • triceratops 7mo ago
    The politicians say what the people with money want them to.
    • Forgeties79 7mo ago
      Or they could just do their job in good faith because most of them come from money and have a good salary. A dream, I know.
• goda90 7mo ago
  In January, the youtuber Technology Connections did a whole rant about how ridiculous it is that we're not rushing as quickly as possible to get off of non-renewable energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
  • scoofy 7mo ago
    It really is crazy that environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," and suddenly everyone started screaming "No, boo! We like the way things are!" I have a friend who has never used an induction range before that is dead set that he never wants one. I just don't get it.
    • scottLobster 7mo ago
      To be fair induction ranges aren't without issues, not due to the concept itself but failures in implementation. Touch screen controls are rife and not only become impossible to use when, say, grease is splattered on them or your hands are wet/wearing gloves (common when cooking on a stove top), they can even be falsely activated by such things. Cold spots can also be a concern depending on your cookware. Unfortunately a lot of promising technology has matured in a time of consumer product enshitification, and there is no established track record for people to be nostalgic for.
      • scoofy 7mo ago
        Again, I’m talking about someone who has never used one who has their mind made up. I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring gas. It has many superior use cases. My point is that “no, I like things this way and won’t ever consider trying the other thing, much less changing, even though the other thing ends up being effectively free in the long run” is silly, and almost certainly based in some kind of identity. Where as I think most curious people would think "Oh, neat, a new cooking surface. I'd like to try that thing."
      • stickfigure 7mo ago
        LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful.
• JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too "This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028."
• scottLobster 7mo ago
  Pessimistically, this will lead to the return of old-school Imperialism to secure the necessary oil supplies and increased exploitation of known deposits. Just because there's an obvious good choice for the average citizen doesn't mean we'll take it, as recent history has more than proven.
• wesleyd 7mo ago
  Nice. Another upside seems to be that every Arab country in the Middle East seems to be on the same side as Israel. Nothing unites like a common enemy!
• epsters 7mo ago
  I am not sure getting a million people killed in another decades-long middle-eastern war (one whose scale and tragedies will likely overshadow all the previous wars we have seen so far in region) in a country of 90 million people is really worth the push to renewables.
• aetimmes 7mo ago
  Only a small fraction of a typical barrel of oil is allocated to energy generation. The majority goes to transportation/industrial use-cases. The transportation usage can be allayed with sonar energy, but the industrial use-cases cannot.
  • cheema33 7mo ago
    I don't think anyone is making the argument that solar panels can completely replace fossil fuels in the short term. However, more electrification is better all around.
• ropable 7mo ago
  As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.
  • zahlman 7mo ago
    > the fuel bowser The what? > "Buying a BYD car ASAP" A what kind of car?
    • zahlman 7mo ago
      I don't understand why I am downvoted. My questions are genuine. I legitimately have no idea what GP meant by either of those things, and legitimately don't understand why I supposedly should know.
• coolThingsFirst 7mo ago
  Why didnt Iran use this earlier to get rich?
  • N_Lens 7mo ago
    Because it would have been an act of aggression to close off the strait. Iran did not want to invite war, the US and Israel have entirely been the aggressors in this recent conflict.
    • coolThingsFirst 7mo ago
      Sanctions were also an act of aggression. Iran could ask for fees for US ships to make up for their losses due to sanctions.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• masswerk 7mo ago
  On the dark side, it will take quite a while to offset the environmental costs of this war, even if this provided an essential incentive for switching. (In reality, energy infrastructure is often locked in longterm and not easy to switch in just in a decade or so.)
• deleted 7mo ago
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