US officials hold Venezuela meetings amid hunt for alternative oil supplies | Hacker News Reader

US officials hold Venezuela meetings amid hunt for alternative oil supplies

ft.com

21 pointsmudro_zboris27 comments

This is absurd. Everybody has known for absolutely decades that a big problem with oil is that most of the petrostates are nuts. Russia is, by oil-producer standards, about middle of the pack when it comes to behaviour.

Everybody is going to have to get off oil at some point anyway, why not do it now when the will is there? Or do people just think global warming will go away?

> Everybody is going to have to get off oil at some point anyway, why not do it now when the will is there? Or do people just think global warming will go away?

Broad strokes, people who buy low fuel economy vehicles (SUVs, pickup trucks) vote their feelings [1], and there is overlap with the same folks who don't believe in climate change.

Arguably, the pain is good (economic incentive and signal), but you have to create a one way ratchet so we can only push harder to getting off oil, and everyone doesn't go back to buying combustion SUVs and pickup trucks when (if?) the price of oil recedes again. If 50 years [2] isn't enough time to get away from oil, I'm unsure what'll do it. It's also a marketing campaign: you have to sell EVs as an energy security issue to those who economics and climate change benefits won't appeal to. More incentives for EVs would also be helpful.

Very much agree it's absurd though.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/what-your-car-might-say-a... ("Republicans make up 55% of the full-size utility (SUV) market and 53% of the heavy duty pickup market (table below); Democrats make up 38% and 36% of the small and mid-size APT (hybrids, EVs) market, respectively. The single greatest Republican-Democrat disparity is the heavy duty pickup truck segment, where Republicans buy eight pickups to one for each Democratic buyer.")

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis

I take issue with your representations here. Republicans have more trucks because there are more Republicans in areas where trucks are currently necessary for life. Republicans may also vote with their feelings more (in my opinion that's both true and a ridiculous blanket statement), but that has nothing to do with truck ownership other than some very nuanced answers as to "why" these people choose to vote Republican.

I encourage you to have a conversation with someone with a pickup truck whether they “need” it (versus an all wheel drive vehicle of better fuel efficiency) and if they’re willing to pay more (ie the true cost) for fuel to live their lifestyle. I have had the conversation, numerous times, with predictable results. I mean this seriously, go get some ground truth if your circumstances permit.

You don’t need a pickup truck to live in a rural area, even in the winter, and if you do need it (frequent towing/bed hauling), there is a cost that should not be subsidized by others.

I stand by my broad assertions based on too much reading and too many greasy spoon diner conversations from the East Coast to the Rockies. We could get off of oil much, much faster, but most folks would rather hold on to the bitter end.

Edit: I appreciate the data point even when it contradicts my thesis. Thanks for asking them! (I live in the South, not California fwiw) I owe you a beer for the trouble.

Well, I'm at a bar right now in "flyover" country, and the bar is packed but quiet, everyone is having conversations about what they did last week and what they're up to next week, along with news and sports and general bullshit. I asked the man next to me your question after hearing him talk about how he finally had to get a new set of tires after 5 years of pulling stumps and hauling equipment. I actually asked him, "Do you really need a truck?" He told me, direct quote, "Every day I haul saws, chains, oil, gas, drills, a generator. You don't want that shit in your back seat or trunk."

I then asked him what he does for a living and why he needed to haul all that.

He works for Amazon, just like many of you. He also does self sustaining farming, just like many of you claim to support and praise. He also clears trees from roads after storms, free of charge. He also helps when his friends and family need to move. He also carries de-icing salt to distribute to his family when it snows. He just asked me if I'm talking to "one of those California know-nothings". He didn't use any slurs.

I grew up in farming country and nobody I knew had an american-style truck. Some farmers had old military-style jeeps, but none of them were particularly large, and if they wanted to carry stuff, they could put it in a trailer. Guys who haul stuff like scrap around typically have a flatbed van.

I get that a van isn't sexy, but it's a great value proposition if you want to haul stuff about.

Given that rural areas have more land, on which one could put solar panels and/or small wind turbines and thus have some electricity for free, I wonder if electric pickup trucks would ultimately be cheaper for people to run overall? In which case people who are apparently surgically attached to pickups, might at least be motivated to switch to EV version? ;)

The change wont happen overnight, but meanwhile if the price of oil climbs high, it both helps Russia, and economically hurts a lot of countries that rely on oil. Oil is also an input in more than just the energy sector -- lots of plastics rely on oil.

There's an argument to be made that these are all negative things, and I don't disagree. But any change will take time.

In the meanwhile there's also the geopolitical goal -- it would make sense for the US to crash or at least keep down the price of oil right now.

I remember talks during the 90s about decreasing our dependence on foreign oil. If we did not make the transition to renewables decades ago then we kind of deserve the insane prices.

In 9th grade c. 1970, I was in a special studies class where, one quarter, we had to write a paper on any subject. My father, an economist, suggested I write about "Oil Import Control" (not a topic to excite a 9th grader, but very interesting when I got to be an adult). He got copies from the GPO of contemporary Senate hearings studying the subject of limiting oil exports for security reasons. (Not exciting reading for a 9th grader!)

So, the federal government was actively looking into our foreign dependence on oil back c. 1970 (and no doubt at times in prior decades). 50 years later and all we've got are "Drill, baby, drill!" slogans and slow movement to renewables.

Midterms just around the corner... better get oil back to winnable levels before then

Climate change vs energy sux don’t it? If the pipeline from Alberta into the us was in existence, more could flow to us refineries. But as I always wonder, is n America short of oil or gasoline? I’m unaware of refineries being built or expanded there in the last few decades…

Refineries are the bottleneck in the US, not oil supplies. The world doesn't need Alberta's dirty-ass oil sands oil.

Old proverb: "Always be nice to people when on your way up the ladder. You'll be meeting them again on your way down the ladder."

Seems sanctioned Venezuelan oil is now to be non-sanctioned. If I was Venezuela, my retort would be "Fuck Off!"

This seems like a weird view of the situation. It's not as if the US is on its way down the ladder in this moment. It's just that Venezuela is now the lesser of the evils, not that they became less evil, but Russia became more evil.

You’re taking the proverb too literally. Might be more that the US has recently participated in undermining and overthrowing the Venezuelan regime. You can’t just fck over a country one day and try to do business the next

Following the same rhetoric of the pro Russia propaganda, Venezuela is in the sphere of influence of the US and should make a special military operation /s, but this one would actually be going against a real fascist regime /not s.

State department tried by recognizing Guaido as president even seizing CITGO properties. And besides spec ops in Latin America is so Cold War!! We are gentlemen, only economic warfare is allowed nowadays.

You forgot the part where Chavez and Maduro took a relatively well functioning state and turned it into a failed one.

Wouldn't mind a small scale spec ops to purge the rats in the government and army, I'm sure that 70% or more of the population would support it or be neutral about it.

Why can’t we open up the keystone pipeline again?

I assume you're talking about the Keystone XL pipeline. The biggest problem is that it has to be built before it can be closed and then opened again.

Because no one is incentivized to prevent and clean up spills

What incentives are needed? I'll grant that spills and such are inevitable somewhere, so how could prevention of those also be incentivized? Who exactly needs to be incentivized?

For clarification I'm a rare breed of (educated) environmentalist that believes we need to continue domestic oil production, albeit with significant consideration for the immediate and long term consequences of the operation.

I agree that we need better ways to capture and distribute energy, and that we needed it a long time ago, and that every second we don't have it, shit gets worse for the future. I understand, and fight for it daily in a variety of ways.

But I'm also aware that we need affordable energy to sustain the cultural aspects we all adore. We need energy NOW in order to develop the methods we needed years ago and do our best to catch up and minimize the worst. "Teaching gas guzzlers a lesson" and other far more nuanced ideas in the same vein are the rhetoric du jour, but that's short sighted enough to be dangerous imo.

In short, I think we need to invest in the now to accelerate solutions for the future. Cold turkey won't work here.

https://archive.ph/6Sh6s

Imo, the biggest mistake made by auto industry is to not transition regular gasoline powered cars to hybrid in the past decade. Such a low hanging fruit.

Too paywall; didn’t read.

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