Oil is near a price that hurts the economy

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/we-are-going-make-a-...

Comparing with Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) and certain EU countries (Vienna, Netherlands, etc.), it just shocks me how much people need a car for everything. Even a visitor needs to rent a car to properly go about their business.

I'm strongly in favor of zero emissions. We also have to give fossil fuels their due for getting us here. I don't think the comparison to asbestos holds.

You're going to have to give us your calculations there.

Because a gigantic amount of life improvement is also attributable to using fossil fuels for energy. So how exactly are you weighing up the two sides? Not to mention, it's hard to see how we ever would have been able to create the modern forms of renewable energy in the first place without fossil fuels as an intermediate technological phase.

And it's not even clear how you'd attribute political violence to fossil fuels. You don't need fossil fuels for massive warfare. And if you remove one primary resource from the equation, then another resource now becomes primary, and people will be fighting over that. In the days of the Roman Empire, grain was the strategic resource.

"And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

The way fossil fuels have been exploited has been categorically evil, and from that perspective I think the "industry" is going to be seen as a net negative. The negative externalities are in line with the waste generated by the development of nuclear weapons (think Hanford) on an even grander scale. But it would have been impossible for us to reach a point where it was possible to produce solar cells, hydro, and wind energy without the incredible energy density of petroleum fuels. The fuel for the industrial revolution that gave us our modern livelihoods. Petroleum-derived fertilizers are what enable the global population that we have today, so in a very real sense you and I would not exist without the development of fossil fuels on a grand scale. Whether or not that is a benefit or a deficit to mankind will probably be left to the historians.

Lest anyone think I condone the irreparable damage done to the planet by the industrialization enabled by reckless exploitation of petroleum, I think the whole thing is shameful, and I feel a bit of shame every time I have to drive my gasoline-powered car to the store. But I think there was a responsible way to harvest and benefit from that natural resource and like most natural resources, human greed found a way to make the worst of it.

The pen, pencil and paper are somewhat obvious. Less obvious is that we also need them to make glue at an industrial scale [1].

[1] https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/sustainability/sealed-fate-pe...

I think there's probably a lot of rosy math in this counterfactual. Perhaps one can argue that post the nuclear age, we could have made some choices that environmentalists would oppose that would nonetheless have been better for the environment, but "from the beginning of use"? I think that I'd like to see.

EDIT: It would be a fun universe to play with, though. Do we use solar concentrators to provide the power to make grain ethanol? We'd have to master food production first without Haber-Bosch though. That sounds like a real challenge.

Likewise, curious about the cost and value that air conditioning and refrigeration have provided. I'm not sure how you do a back of the envelope calculation to address opening up the southern United States-- something that wouldn't have been likely without the low cost of electricity given by coal (outside the TVA region).

For a start, there are a ton of non-energy uses of fossil fuels (eg fertilizer, plastics, roads). There are certain vehicles with huge impediments to switching away (eg planes, ships).

And beyond all that there are a ton of other sources of greenhouse gases, notably construction, specifically concrete.

We’ve taken a ton of sequestered carbon from the ground. To get net zero we’d have to sequester at least this much and the real way we have is growing plants. There are only so many plants you can grow.

So how do you get to get net zero?

In other words, this might be true because the “inflation-rate“ was high, but it was high because the cost of oil went up.

For a moment I was excited. I'd be a little bit interested to see someone come up with a smaller V8 -- more efficient, but still all the right noises! Still have higher pumping losses compared to fewer cylinders, but might be worth it even still.

The engine is still 5.0L. The supercharger is 3.0L. And that is why it makes 810 horsepower.

(Looks sadly at the 1.3L Eaton supercharger on my workbench and feels inadequate)

There may be some short term spikes, but $100/barrel is the hard limit now. We actually have effectively unlimited oil supplies now, but the economics of it don't converge until that price. At 100$, it becomes feasible for all of the more expensive fracking infrastructure to come back online, which puts a hard cap on the price.