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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Amazing quote:

  > The World Trade Center officially opened on a rainy morning in April 1973. Then, that
  > fall, the members of OPEC declared an oil embargo against nations that supported
  > Israel during the Yom Kippur War and the price of gasoline skyrocketed, sending the U.S.
  > economy into a tailspin. Economic stagnation combined with plummeting tax revenue resulting
  > from an exodus of wealthy (and largely white) residents left New York in an intractable
  > financial crisis. By 1975, the city had run out of money to pay for normal operating
  > expenses and faced the prospect of defaulting on its obligations and declaring bankruptcy.

If that wasn't a sign to get off the oil dependence, I don't know what will be. OPEC has the Western world - and now the Eastern world as well - by the throat. Surely policy-makers are aware of this.

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OPEC is basically toothless. When the price of oil is above around $50-70/barrel there are too many different sourced that can produce it profitably.[1]

1973 was a surprise (no one thought the countries involved could stick together).

The major countries in OPEC (in particular Saudi Arabia, which can produce oil at around $10/barrel) still have power, but since the development of shale oil in mid 2000's even that power is diminished.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/597669/cost-breakdown-of... (Note that this doesn't include distribution costs which are significant)

Just a footnote: oil shale and tar sands were considered too dirty when I was in high school in the early 1990s, because they require the same order of magnitude of energy to extract as the oil itself contains.

The Bush v Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 was largely about if we were going to double down on fossil fuels or transition to renewables IMHO. As usual, the US made the.. let's just say not progressive choice.

Tons of documentaries talk about these sorts of unforced errors that get buried under revisionist history:

https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com

I recommend the documentary Hypernormalisation for further background and commentary about these events.

https://invidious.weblibre.org/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw

The United States does not depend on OPEC any longer and in fact the US is a net energy exporter. If needed the US could be entirely self sufficient in terms of energy.

Europe chose a different path and now they’re beholden not only to OPEC but also to Russia.

However, energy is an international market and being “independent” is more of a political idea than something that could ever exist in reality.

Policy-makers have in the main one primary concern which is that they remain policy-makers. Everything else is secondary to that.

> Economic stagnation combined with plummeting tax revenue resulting from an exodus of wealthy (and largely white) residents left New York in an intractable financial crisis.

For context, in the 1970s the US was ~83% white (57% today) [1], and New York was ~62% white (30% today) [2]. So you could append "largely white" to most things at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_Yor...

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