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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Without oil dependence, the US can let the Middle East sink back into the sand. That's going to happen eventually anyway.

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So long as the EU is more or less aligned with the US and the Suez Canal exists, the Middle East as a flashpoint is not going anywhere.

Right now, most container sea traffic is going around Cape Horn rather than risking the Red Sea. China is working on the Belt and Road scheme to move container traffic from China to Europe to rail.

Isn't rail shipping far more expensive than, er, ships? Also, good luck getting anything from China to Europe via rail without going through either Iran (the Middle East) or Russia (not exactly on friendly terms with Europe at the moment, to put it lightly).

I was thinking that, but on the map at least there's the possibility of Turkmenistan-Caspian-Azerbaijan.

I know almost nothing about these places, despite an Azerbaijani coworker, so this may be unrealistic for other reasons.

Georgia has its frozen conflict with Russia and the Azeris have had recent on-and-off war with the Armenians, so it's not a great route either.

it's more expensive, but they are getting closer. 30+ days by ship vs 10 days by rail, insurance, inflation and other risks. It could be just 2x more expensive. For high and mid added value product it doesn't matter much.

I can imagine year 2060 when there is a magnetic rail link between Asia and Europe. Only some commodities like wheat go through Suez.

Right, because it's a flashpoint at this very moment.

*Cape of Good Hope, they are going around Africa

Right, right. Cape Horn is the southern tip of South America.

The Belt and Road maps I've seen are pretty low resolution, are they still going through Iran? Because I'd think that counts as "middle east", even if it's not the Suez.

The US hasn't been dependent on Middle East crude oil for some years. We still maintain security guarantees there to support key allies, and contain hostile foreign powers, but that will gradually fade away as part of the foreign policy pivot to Asia. European countries need to get moving on rebuilding expeditionary military forces in order to ensure reliable energy supplies (the notion that they can quickly transition to green energy is a total fantasy).

and frankly the more poorly informed western elites try to protest and prevent extraction and distribution of western (i.e. Canada, USA) oil and gas, the more dependent we will all be on oil from places like Saudi and Russia.

people really don't get it.

We are dependent in as much as gas prices going up 50 cents would cause widespread riots apparently. So yes, we are no longer getting 70% of our oil from Saudi Arabia so they can quite simply hold us by the balls, but we are still desperate to keep the rest of the world's oil supply flowing regularly so that we can keep our own internal prices "American friendly".

Think how far along we would have been had Reagan not been a contrarian asshole who took brand new solar panels off the whitehouse just because. The man signed off on he SuperConducting-SuperCollider because he understood how valuable science investment was, then promptly ignored that for national energy policy because his friends preferred to get rich.

US gasoline prices are only somewhat linked to global crude oil prices because we lifted the export ban in 2015. If domestic prices get high enough to cause major political problems then the export ban can simply be reinstated.

Oil isn't easily replaced, though. It's not just energy, there are all the products derived from it. If you shut it off suddenly, things would collapse.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to replace it, but if we had easy replacement we wouldn't have these problems in the first place.

Have you seen where materials for batteries come from? Not exactly homegrown by hippies.

Indeed (though neither is the USA itself), however you have to try quite hard to damage a battery in a way that means recycling it at end of life is harder than extracting raw elements from rocks in the ground, so a steady-state battery setup is much less vulnerable than the 20th century setup for oil… provided there's sufficient will to actually build the recycling plants and manufacturing capability in most nations, and it's much too early to see how that plays out given the current scale of operations.

Similar arguments also apply to PV cells and wind turbines.

Typically mined by (say) first nation Australians in Laverton, Western Australia from Mount Weld mine: https://youtu.be/LXEbznvl0wM?t=108

Then shipped to Malaysia as concentrate for cracking & leaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oij3c8GGWmw

Other similar stories exist in the supply chain, but that's one high volume link.

Not hippies of the 1960s San Francisco Haight-Ashbury ilk, but certainly regular people about the globe.

See the IEA: Global Supply Chains of EV Batteries (2022) - https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/4eb8c252-76b1-4710-...

    Most key minerals are mined in resource-rich countries such as Australia, Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and handled by a few major companies.

    Governments in Europe and the United States have bold public sector initiatives to develop domestic battery supply chains, but the majority of the supply chain is likely to remain Chinese through 2030.

    For example, 70% of battery production capacity announced for the period to 2030 is in China.

Note: that's "majority owned by Chinese companies" not "entirely within the country of China".

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