5 ms·

> 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production. This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-t

> 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production. This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is. The primary historical impediment to electric vehicles was high up-front cost, in turn driven by high battery costs. However: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-price https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-pric... We're soon to have electric cars (and trucks) that cost less ICE ones, on top of the lower operating costs. Which in turn cost even less when more solar and wind are added to the grid because the "charge more when power is cheap and less when it's expensive" thing lowers their operating cost even further and reduces the amount of natural gas you need in the grid because periods of lower renewable generation can be offset by deferred charging instead of natural gas peaker plants. Even without any purposeful efforts to do anything about climate change, the economics point to fossil fuels declining over time as a proportion of energy. Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years and the next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result rather than impede it. Which makes a long-term strategy of building the capacity to target petroleum infrastructure something that could plausibly be increasingly irrelevant by the time it would take to implement it.

zimpenfish 7mo ago
> This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is. It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it? > Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though" > next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.
- bluGill 7mo ago
  It might be the goal - but there are a lot of other factors than just one party.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it? The stated goal of the same party is to have "cheap energy" and the way voters judge is by things like how much they're paying for electricity. Which means their incentive is to make a lot of noise about how much they hate windmills and love coal while not actually preventing data center companies from building new solar farms to power them. One of their most significant benefactors is also the CEO of the largest domestic electric car company. > Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though" Two years is forever in politics. We also have the leader of the Republican party doing all the pandering he can right now because he's trying to sustain a majority in the midterms, whereas in 2028 he can't run, and what's Trump going to do in the intervening two years during which he has no personal stake in the next election? > Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President. That's not what happened last time. The electric car subsidies were introduced in 2008 and sustained until 2025. We're also at the point where these things are going to get rapidly adopted during any period without active resistance to them. How many years of the majority of new vehicles being electric or plug-in hybrids would it take before there are enough in the installed base to cause a long-term reduction in petroleum demand, and in turn a reduction in the economic and political power of the oil companies? Also notice that this still happens if Asia and Europe adopt electric vehicles regardless of whether or to what extent the US does, since it's a global commodity market.
maxglute 7mo ago
Yes, refinery mismatch vulnerability something that can be built around, ~10-15 year horizon. US can also bring down oil as % of energy mix and distribute renewables. If US smart they would do this. But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range. But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.
- AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
  > But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Hyperscalers are probably not a great example because a) they don't really benefit that much from being physically centralized (especially at the building level rather than the regional level) and b) data is one of the easiest things to keep redundant, and then even if you destroy a large facility, backups get restored to another facility or distributed set of facilities with no downtime at all if the target is well-prepared and only a short period of time if they've done even minimum diligence. The critical ones can also do the "build it on the inside of a mountain" thing and then your capacity to take down grandpa's WordPress is mainly useful to the target for rallying opposition against you. > whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). If "energy" turns into solar panels on the roof of every house and widely distributed low density wind farms etc., that's pretty hard to target. In general centralization is often done because it has economies of scale, but those same economies of scale have diminishing returns. One huge facility reduces certain fixed costs by a million to one (i.e. 99.9999%) over having a million small facilities, but a thousand medium facilities are much harder to target while still reducing them by 99.9% and the remaining 0.0999% is negligible because you're long since already dominated by unit costs. The target can also choose where to take the trade off based on how likely they expect to be targeted. And that's a broadly applicable principle rather than something that only applies to any specific industry.

zimpenfish 7mo ago

> This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is. It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it? > Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though" > next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.

bluGill 7mo ago
It might be the goal - but there are a lot of other factors than just one party.
AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
> It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it? The stated goal of the same party is to have "cheap energy" and the way voters judge is by things like how much they're paying for electricity. Which means their incentive is to make a lot of noise about how much they hate windmills and love coal while not actually preventing data center companies from building new solar farms to power them. One of their most significant benefactors is also the CEO of the largest domestic electric car company. > Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though" Two years is forever in politics. We also have the leader of the Republican party doing all the pandering he can right now because he's trying to sustain a majority in the midterms, whereas in 2028 he can't run, and what's Trump going to do in the intervening two years during which he has no personal stake in the next election? > Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President. That's not what happened last time. The electric car subsidies were introduced in 2008 and sustained until 2025. We're also at the point where these things are going to get rapidly adopted during any period without active resistance to them. How many years of the majority of new vehicles being electric or plug-in hybrids would it take before there are enough in the installed base to cause a long-term reduction in petroleum demand, and in turn a reduction in the economic and political power of the oil companies? Also notice that this still happens if Asia and Europe adopt electric vehicles regardless of whether or to what extent the US does, since it's a global commodity market.

maxglute 7mo ago

Yes, refinery mismatch vulnerability something that can be built around, ~10-15 year horizon. US can also bring down oil as % of energy mix and distribute renewables. If US smart they would do this. But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range. But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.

AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
> But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Hyperscalers are probably not a great example because a) they don't really benefit that much from being physically centralized (especially at the building level rather than the regional level) and b) data is one of the easiest things to keep redundant, and then even if you destroy a large facility, backups get restored to another facility or distributed set of facilities with no downtime at all if the target is well-prepared and only a short period of time if they've done even minimum diligence. The critical ones can also do the "build it on the inside of a mountain" thing and then your capacity to take down grandpa's WordPress is mainly useful to the target for rallying opposition against you. > whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). If "energy" turns into solar panels on the roof of every house and widely distributed low density wind farms etc., that's pretty hard to target. In general centralization is often done because it has economies of scale, but those same economies of scale have diminishing returns. One huge facility reduces certain fixed costs by a million to one (i.e. 99.9999%) over having a million small facilities, but a thousand medium facilities are much harder to target while still reducing them by 99.9% and the remaining 0.0999% is negligible because you're long since already dominated by unit costs. The target can also choose where to take the trade off based on how likely they expect to be targeted. And that's a broadly applicable principle rather than something that only applies to any specific industry.