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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading The End of The World is Just the Beginning https://www.amazon.com/End-World-Just-Beginning-Globalizatio... I hope he is wrong about globalization falling apart, but articles like this are right out of his book.

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So far it seems like we're doing the "worst of both worlds" approach, where trade becomes crazy expensive and we don't build domestic capacity and global oil falls apart and we don't make up for it at home with increased capacity or export restrictions. We're in a situation where the US neither produces its own ships nor lets foreign-owned ships move cargo between US ports. Frankly I think Zeihan's biggest flaw, other than absurd simplification of complex industries, is that he's far too optimistic about the ability of countries, particularly the US, to act even remotely in their own best interests. Political decisions aren't being made according to what someone (right or wrong) thinks will benefit us; they're being made on the basis of validating our personal socio-political identities. If X is associated with your party then you push for X whether or not X is obviously suicidal. Scoring points off the opposition has become more important than survival.

My understanding is that the US President (currently Biden) can unilaterally ban oil exports and that this would immediately drop US oil prices to $70-80/barrel and spike global oil prices by 30%+. I wonder how bad domestic gas prices would need to be before this happens because it definitely feels like it would be a permanent nail in the coffin of energy globalization.

It would certainly screw over US allies but it wouldn't do that much good for domestic prices because domestic refineries aren't built to use light/sweet American oil. Domestic production would collapse as domestic oil sat unusable for months. What we need is taxes/regulations to force the building of refineries to process domestic crude.

Hold on, I'm in Canada, and the story here, is that we don't have domestic refineries, we get gas from US ones, now I hear you guys are told the you don't have domestic refineries too?!

What, is everyone told this???

The commenter your replying to is talking about "sweet" oil. According to this adage, US refineries are setup to process sour oil but in the US we drill for sweet oil. As a result we need to export sweet oil and import sour oil.

I've heard from one person, who delivers oil, that our refineries are able to switch relatively easily. So, I'm unsure what the whole story is, but that's what the other comment was referring to. We definitely do refining in the US and there are several refineries near me.

I'm sure the story is, "Tell em anything just keep the profits high".

If your refineries can process cheap sour oil, they can easily be repurposed into processing expensive sweet oil.

But why would you do that, instead of selling the expensive oil and buying some cheap one back?

It’s all rented from a refinery in Virginia called us-east-1.

We have plenty of refineries tuned for all kinds of crude. The vast majority of US crude gets refined here, and exported as refined products.

That's not to say the industry wouldn't go belly up from suddenly having a bunch of unused, expensive oil refineries, but our ability to refine US oil wouldn't be in peril from a lack of refineries.

>force the building of refineries to process domestic crude.

Who would want to build a refinery when the current President has stated he wants to shut down the fossil fuel industry?

> My understanding is that the US President (currently Biden) can unilaterally ban oil exports and that this would immediately drop US oil prices to $70-80/barrel and spike global oil prices by 30%+. I wonder how bad domestic gas prices would need to be before this happens because it definitely feels like it would be a permanent nail in the coffin of energy globalization.

There is a big problem with banning US oil exports. Oil is priced in US dollars and this only works if the US continues to be a global political player. If the US stops exports, the price of oil in dollars will rise so much that most other countries will have no choice but to start importing from Russia again - and in a currency that is not US dollars.

Overnight, the US will experience rapid inflation due to all the printed dollars losing value for the rest of the world.

It would be nice to first try getting domestic oil production back up to 2019 levels.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

So the rest of the world goes into recession, so that drags down the US with it. And/or low prices lead to low investment, both in to new oil and alternative energy thus dooming the industry long term while giving the rest of the world a head start in future technologies. And/or the rest of the world gets pissed off, imposes their own sanctions, look to more reliable allies, look to different reserve currencies etc etc etc.

I didn't have the patience to finish The Fourth Turning [1], but it's arguing that the US has been working on 80 year major cycles for a long time. I like "end of a cycle" better than "end of the world." :) I'd be interested to know if there are related studies outside the US.

Something I didn't learn about until recently [2] was Glocalization. Wikipedia [3] says it's been around since the 80s. Perhaps now's a good time to bring it out again.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

2. https://drpippa.substack.com/p/glocalization

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glocalization

I read that and found it fascinating. Everything doesn't fit as neatly into the 80 year cycles as they might like, but I think they acknowledge that.

I'm not that familiar with the Fourth Turning and this also originates from the US, but I did find it quite helpful when considering where things are, have been and might be going and how the US is in a cycle along with other nations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8

I'd also not heard of Glocalization, but it reminds me of a couple of topics that are covered in Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life book (also a course), around emergent behaviour in complex systems and how this competes with top down command and control ideas (or in organisations as the formal and informal networks).

In this case it seems more like a country that is severely mismanaged is now falling apart completely. I feel for the people in it, but this is not indicative of the real state of the world.

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