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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

I love EVs, ever since I test drove an BMW i3 in 2012. Quiet with high drag - of course this is the future.

BUT I don't think switching to EVs will help reduce CO2 in any way - not even if all the EVs are charged using 100% solar/wind. The narrative usually is "I get an EV instead of an ICE, charge it with regenerative energy and have 0 emissions, thus not burning oil and saving on CO2".

But that is not how a globalized world with free markets works. In order to save on CO2, we would need to keep that oil not burned by the EV underground, but that does not take place. The market reality is that oil price will just drop with less demand from ICE vehicles. But with falling prices, other business models that require refined oil will become viable and the oil is still burned - just somewhere else. No one so far has made a good argument why the Saudis or Russians would leave their ressources underground, just because demand from ICE vehicles drop.

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What you're missing here is that oil production and processing has huge fixed costs. Producers can't just pump out infinite oil at zero cost. The economies of scale break down and fuels become more expensive as demand drops.

Cars do zero Carbon capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS). The potential is there to emit negligible CO2 when it's only energy-intensive large industry doing the fuel burning.

Having said that, the path being taken in some countries to remove ICE is simply pushing large swathes of the population out of the car market. I don't support that, although I'm sure there are many people who do.

Reduced demand for oil reduces the quantity of oil extracted and purduced. The price drops and hardwr to extract oil stops being produced

> Reduced demand for oil reduces the quantity of oil extracted

That is not true. Reduced price leads to higher demand. This is economics 101.

> The price drops and hardware to extract oil stops being produced

Oil extraction costs differ vastly amongst countries, and there is a lot of potential for increased productivity and efficencies when the margins become lower - price pressure is a driver for innovation. And countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia have a very high incentive to keep extracting oil and sell it, because their economy relies on it.

> This is economics 101.

OK.

And did you go to Economics 201?

Because there, you might have learned that the basic economic principles you describe as "economics 101" are the equivalent of the "spherical cow in a frictionless vacuum"-type examples you get in introductory physics classes.

In the real world, demand is affected by all kinds of things, and sometimes, a product or service is just no longer desired by the population. Do you think that if you were selling buggy whips for $0.05 each, you'd be able to make a profit on them today? Of course not, because people don't need them. You'd barely sell any, and those purely as a novelty.

While there's still a lot of work to do to make it fully possible, and certain political groups are actively working against it, the world at large recognizes that getting off of fossil fuels is an important goal. Demand for oil is going to continue to drop—maybe not monotonically, but overall—regardless of what the price of oil does.

Your entire point hinges on EVs idrying up the oil market that there is no more demand. But ICEs don't run on oil, they run on gas or diesel. Oil is used in far more industries (aviation, ships). Plus, you cannot account for business models that become viable, that haven't been viable before. People come up with new ideas all the time.

...No? It doesn't?

My point is not that if there are no more ICE cars, there will be no market for oil. It's that the portion of the market for oil that has, heretofore, serviced ICE cars is starting to disappear, and it won't be coming back, nor will it be repurposed to service anything else, to any significant degree.

The broader point is that, because of the environmental consequences, people all over the world are diligently working on ways to eliminate the other markets for oil. And they will also not be coming back.

Oil is on its way out, period. Not this year, not this decade, possibly not this century...but it's going. And the world will be much, much better off for it.

(It's just possible that there will be some tiny fraction of the current uses for oil that we can't find any meaningful replacement for, but it's not going to be much.)

Come on, our world is running on plastics and oil as fuel for ships and aviation. EV savings will be eaten up within years by those.

Which businesses will become viable that will consume oil at this scale?

Aviation industry comes to mind. The price of an airline ticket is mostly the fuel. With cheaper airline tickets, more people can afford to fly (especially in developing countries). And also, poor countries suddenly are able to get oil cheaper and built their industries just as we did 50 years ago.

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