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Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

The only solution would be to drastically reduce the value of oil and therefore make it uneconomic to dig it up. The easy-access oil is decreasing and extraction becomes more expensive.

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I think from just the very chemistry of oil we can't reduce it's value enough to stop using it. The chemical processes that created it have sequestered massive amounts of energy from the past, energy that we can still use in the future, energy that we don't need take out of our future budgets. Even a space-faring species would take advantage of oil if they deign to enter a planet's gravity well.

There is an "easy" solution to this problem - introduce a new (preferably renewable) energy source that is an order of magnitude cheaper than oil.

It already exists in the form of Solar/Wind + batteries + EV.

Also, as price decrease for this combo, tax fossil fuels for all the damages caused to the environment (taxes to be used to help people switch to renewable energy, and for this transition only otherwise they won't support that tax).

There another angle to this--USA provides vast sums of other monetary aid to oil production.

Since it has been a (or perhaps the) strategic commodity, nationally, since WWI our foreign policy is in part directed at those supplies. We expend much military might in the effort to acquire and maintain the alliances and security of the transportation and production of the stuff.

A lot of the geopolitical game in the middle east is about the oil. Not "We're gonna take over your country and take it it!" exactly, but the Suez Canal, the Straits of Hormuz, international shipping lanes, and current geopolitical need for a gas pipeline to supply natural gas to Europe drives a lot of jockeying, international conflict, and of course, US strategic military bases, of which there are many.

Also I read in the news that some government official put boots are on the ground to protect a Saudi oil field (?...!)

So my response to your comment is: "Yes!" however, there will be a long political battle with an absurdly well funded opposition for it.

Hm. That actually raises a good point—how long until militaries can operate without gasoline and diesel? Or even significantly reduce their use? Hard to imagine anything competing with petroleum there in the mid-term future, which mean subsidized production will continue to be necessary to any state that wants to be able to self-sufficiently field an army worth having at all.

I mean I guess there's ethanol from plants. Maybe all that corn subsidy stuff actually makes sense in a long-term strategic sense, then. Though you can ramp that up inside a year if you need to and probably much faster by rationing food & feed use of existing corn to repurpose most of it for fuel, so that's probably not what they had in mind and it is just a form of corruption. Crazy, though, if arable land becomes directly correlated to ability to support armored divisions.

Military consumption pales in comparison to civilian consumption though. I can see most large armed forces being OK with using whatever Oil and Gas is produced domestically. Smaller nations without access to oil have a problem, but they probably have smaller armed forces too.

No chance in the short term, really. There's a lot of old hardware running around on reserve bases, and thats at least! All those turbines run avgas or something like diesel, not much of an aircraft person but I can't say for certain. It would certainly be a great challenge to replace all those turbines, and its not just the fuel.

The synthetics have different properties, and it might be the case that all the rubber dissolves on your Sikorsky, fuel liners disappear out of the exhaust, and hopefully whatever whiz-bang alloys we've been producing hold up. Who's to say, it's probably classified.

Imagine telling your people they're gonna lose the battle tested and well supplied turbines and power plants all over all the forces with something conceptually new. Large naval vessels and submarines can at least run nuclear, but there isn't yet a reactor small enough for a gunboat or a helicopter afiak.

Plus, can you imagine the battlefield hazards that would create? Suddenly, it looks to my eyes like a lot fewer people getting rescued when your reactor takes some HEAT and goes supercritical.

Luckily we can try the batteries or whatever out in out cars and lawnmowers first, as a handy side effect developing the currently-nonexistent alternative infrastructure. It wouldn't really be too unreasonable to consider EV and alternative fuels a national security priority, but good luck with that, I say to myself.

Well, there exist carbon capture and artificial fuels. I imagine those will take over crop ethanol as soon as solar gets cheap, for no other reason than that one can extract 100 times more fuel from the same land and there is no upkeep of a biologic system.

Kinda like how whale oil was displaced by dug up hydrocarbons.

Whaling was still happily going until there was an international ban in the seventies or eighties. Despite hydrocarbons whale oil and other products were still used in a surprising range of things. Even now after the "ban" that catch is pushing up near 10,000 a year.

> Even now after the "ban" that catch is pushing up near 10,000 a year.

Not sure this is true. This site[0] puts the total 2018 catch at only 1553.

[0]https://iwc.int/total-catches

That's doesn't include the main catch nations who didn't sign up to the IWC, or later left it, just what's reported to the IWC by member nations. Norway never joined, and Iceland left IWC for instance. Canada and Denmark (Faroes) can exceed that amount just between the two of them. Some nations have long and significant history of fraudulent reporting -- most excessively the Russians.

This

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