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Comment by analogpixel | Hacker News Reader

If we took all the money we spent on war for 2 years, and diverted it to buying $10k electric cars, we could buy everyone in America an electric car, remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it ever again; let other countries fight it out for oil while we move on to bigger and better things.

or we could continue spending all of our money on wars to get oil, fall further and further behind, and be living like the Flintstons in a few years while all the other countries that actually invested in useful stuff forge forward.

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> remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it

The US is the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin. They don't have a dependency on foreign oil. They are also the largest refiner of oil products in the world.

Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.

> The US is the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin.

The US is also the second largest oil importer in the world. A true fact about oil is that it's not all the same, so lumping them all into a single category is a mistake when talking about production/refining/consumption.

> They don't have a dependency on foreign oil.

It does still, because local refining is optimized for a global market not domestic self-sufficiency. It would probably require a bit of the old "seizing the means of production" to change that, and the US is generally opposed to such things.

> The US is also the second largest oil importer in the world.

The US sells oil refinery services to the rest of the world. They "import" crude oil and then "export" the refined product.

US refinery capacity far exceeds its domestic oil production. What did you think they were doing with all that capacity?

This is not as simple as you present it, which is why we import about 70% of our jet fuel from South Korea.

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

Local refining is setup for refining heavier crudes. They can process sweet domestic crudes just fine at a technical level. It would be an economic loss due to underutilized stuff like Cokers, and likely at somewhat reduced overall throughput. Light crude is typically more expensive than heavy which accounts for much of the theoretical economic loss, but perhaps that will be inverted for some time if trends continue.

You would lose some of the bottom of the barrel products like asphalt and the high sulphur products sour crudes have as well, but I'm unsure of how impactful that would be in practice.

I'm certainly no petroleum engineer so I'm sure someone will be along to correct me - but I looked into this when I kept seeing this trotted out. You can definitely refine domestic light crude oils in local refineries setup for heavier crudes. The resulting products will simply be more expensive due to the refinery operating less efficiently. Self-sufficiency for fuel products at least is likely not a major concern for the US if the shit hits the fan for real.

If we don't need foreign oil, why are gas prices going up?

Oil companies reported record profits this week. Surely that’s unrelated?

Are there any times in recent memory where they didn't report record profits though? Maybe they posted record profits despite the war not because of it (I don't think I actually believe this, not who knows).

Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.

This implies that only they have an interest in starting oil wars, but of course it suits the US to be able to inflict supply shocks on other countries. This is an ancient military strategy which the US has leveraged in the past, eg in the runup to WW2. Under the current administration however, it seems to be imposing them indiscriminately, hurting erstwhile allies as well as opponents.

We had no need to fight Iran to begin with. We just did it as a bro move to support a buddy.

And it isn’t over oil it’s over Israel being sick of Iran funding groups that continuously launch rockets at their cities. (Which, frankly I get, but maybe not enough to crash the global economy)

Because the money is the most important thing being lost?

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