Not quite - the red line is a percentage of "total stocks". That should mean a number equal or greater than the reserve. Also, the percentage axis starts at 16, not zero, so the problem remains.
It's a big drop, but most of it happened in 2021-2023: from roughly 650K down to 350K. The more recent drop is down from 415K to 285K. What was it being used for a few years ago?
It looks like it started to plummet in April 2022, which was on Biden's watch (disclaimer: I voted for him). It apparently was in response to supply chain shocks spiking oil prices due to the start of the war in Ukraine.
Having the AI summarize the pros and cons of that action has valid points on both sides. But in his defense, that particular war was not of our doing, unlike the current war with Iran which was initiated impulsively.
Selling oil out of the SPR is the new One Weird Trick Military Planners Hate! Biden was a generally fine president, but pulling oil out of the SPR to balance the budget was an extremely ugly way to do it, and hopefully that loophole gets plugged going forward.
That isn't why he did it, it was not "to balance the budget". It was to make up for the panic after Putin invaded Ukraine. US gasoline prices soared, going up to $4.84 per gallon in June 2022. Releasing the oil caused it to drop. It wasn't given away, it was sold. The reserve was on the way back up in 2024, through when Biden left office. Furthermore, the government turned a large profit: they sold oil when it soared in price, and bought it back at a lower price.
Well... arguably it is partially our doing. Not for the reason's Tucker Carlson & Russia say, but that Obama and later Biden totally sat on their laurels after the Crimean invasion, totally paralyzed by fear of escalation and political fallout.
arguably and partially, perhaps a bit, but they have history to back up that reluctance.
That said, Putin's gonna do what Putin's gonna do and it likely wasn't the Crimean invasion that prompted it. It was the promise of waltzing in and just taking it without resistance.
In 2014, there was no political will in the US political system to do anything--witness Obama drawing the red line in Syria over the use of chemical weapons, and after Assad used them, Congress said "fuck off, we don't want to do anything." Given that Crimea was by far the most Russophile portion of Ukraine (it only veeeery barely voted to support Ukrainian independence in the Ukrainian independence referendum), it was much more difficult to build a case for any sort of intervention there than it would be after Syrian war crimes, and the latter wasn't enough to gain sufficient political will.
On top of that, 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, which means that all of the foreign policy people had been brushing up on their histories of World War I and the causes of said war, which is of course the ur-example of "random event escalates to every great power at war with each other." I definitely felt like a lone voice pointing out that I was getting more World War II vibes, with Putin acting like Hitler: "I just want a little bit of X, it's the last thing I'll ask for, I promise!"
Also, probably more important than the US reaction here is the German reaction, and Germany was in full Russian appeasement mode really right up until Russian tanks were literally rolling across the border in 2022.
Crimea isn't just Russophilic, the majority of the population even before 2014 were ethnic Russians, the majority language was Russian, and it was part of Russia until 1954.
People who make a big point about "Crimea is Ukraine!" are either ignorant or ideological, objectively it's at best debatable.
(And really, there should be no slavs there at all and it should be given back to the Tatars, if anyone really wants to get into the morals...)
My point is the 1991 borders are somewhat arbitrary: they were originally internal administrative divisions inside a larger centralised state.
They don't necessarily represent a natural long term international border, and attaching huge moral significance to the specific strokes of a Soviet bureaucrat's pen is strange
Many borders are arbitrary. The moral significance results when nations go full 1900 with land grabbing invasion and all that psuedohistorical ethnic bullshit. I urge you to read the soviet propaganda for the winter war or that of the nazis and the Sudetendeutschen. It is not distinguishable from the drivel that Putin spouts.
« chemical weapons, and after Assad used them » — Well, he never did. I mean, what would he have accomplished by doing so? That was the “White Helmets” mise-en-scène for propaganda purposes. Remember Colin Powell brazenly lying to the UN (“flawed intel”, if you want to believe that) in order to justify another war on Iraq? Why believe Washington and London, given their track record?
Crimea even declared independence from the Ukraine in the first half of the 1990s.
« [WWI] the ur-example of "random event escalates to every great power at war with each other." » — It was neither a random event nor everyone at war with each other. Rather, Britain had started building an alliance wo wage war on Germany more than ten years before (Entente cordiale 1904, Triple entente 1907), and there was nothing “random” or “sleepwalking” (Clarke) about it. It was all very systematic, see Docherty & Macgregor, “Hidden History”.
« Germany was in full Russian appeasement mode » — Germany, as Russia's key partner, was in full deception mode, and while I think that in early 2015 Merkel still tried to avert and counter the US preparations to start a war about the Ukraine, not exactly being a strong leader, she folded under US pressure/terror (her “shaking attacks” perhaps somehow related), and then curiously renounced office and withdrew in 2021, because she definitely knew what was coming and probably didn't want to handle it. And if you listen to the Bundestag special Sunday session of Feb 25, 2022, it is patently clear, by the extent of what was announced, that there had been at least month-long preparations for this speaking event.
From my experience on this site, people will probably just “flag” this comment, but with a modicum of good will (which regrettably seem to be a scarce resource here) an interesting discussion (for “curiosity's” sake) could be held about how the Russian leadership, encouraged by an elaborate “con game” (where “con” stands for “confidence”), stupidly marched into the giant bear trap that had been prepared, of course under US leadership (hashtag #TrainToWin), starting at the latest in 2014, following the Maidan massacre and “most blatant coup in history” (some US observer whose name I'm forgetting), which was the true beginning of the war, cf. hired snipers interviewed by Gian Micalessin, Pyatt/Nuland and Ashton/Paet leaks (49761459=flgd, 49764198=dead), which should remind everyone that the US was not an innocent bystander but the key organizer of the Ukraine war, which incidentally is highly beneficial to the US and highly detrimental in a strategic sense to Germany, which continues to suffer from the usual weakness in leadership and inability or unwillingness to stand up.
I'm not interested and won't participate in any extended “flame wars” about this topic (or any other), but it would be good to see a reasoned argument instead of “flagging” and insults (which frankly is a kind of intellectual bankruptcy). I was told (49841897) that while “minority views” were appreciated on HN, special care had to be taken when presenting these in order not to “weaponize” them and enter “battle mode”, which is not my intention. Rather, it is to see an honest debate of an interesting topic, which in theory is possible.
How was Germany in deception mode?
It was Russia that invaded and everybody knew that weeks beforehand. I would hope that politicians had been preparing for that. But how would Germany in 2021 been preparing Russia to invade? Does Putin not have any agency?
It was Russia that prepared for the invasion when they stopped supplying the gas spot market in summer 2021 and later rented gas storage but let it empty. In preparation to blackmail Germany. That didn't work out when Xi did not allow the invasion to start before his winter Olympics ended, though.
As for the Maidan revolution. Yanukovych ran on a pro EU platform with the EU association agreement as a main goal. A few days before signing it he got bought of by Putin, declared the agreement dead and called for a custom zone with Belarus and Russia. No shit did people go the streets and protested.
How exactly did the US get Yanukovych to renege on his campaign promises and start the protests?
The German governments were deceiving both their Russian counterparts and their own citizens by preparing the Ukrainian army for war on German territory on Bundeswehr facilities starting in 2014 (and also aiding and abetting Usanian military doing the same openly – hashtag #TrainToWin) while at the same time pretending to abide by their Minsk obligations and strive to reign in the war in Eastern Ukraine which Kiev had started in March 2014. Of course the German govs were not alone in this, the same could be said for other participants in the organization of this war.
The German govs were also behaving deceptively in making various sorts of war preparations (energy, sanctions, seizures, even culture war) while feigning to only care for peace. This is all the more strange as Germany (apart from the Ukraine and Russia) is the main loser in this war, as it would have stood to prosper from a stable and positive relationship with Russia, countering the US war agenda for Europe, and even removing US/UK control over Ukraine (subsequent to the 2014 coup d'êtat), which obviously they didn't dare to attempt.
Yanukovych, corrupt though he may have been, thought that the EU deal was detrimental to his country, and the Russian offer more generous and flexible. That was the reason he didn't sign.
The US organized the “protests” (the likes of which would have been severely crushed by armed police in France or Germany as “terrorist uprising” or some such) by training rioters in camps in the Baltics and (I think) Poland. You could see on video that the “protesters” would attack police in trained manœuvers, for example by spraying foam or soap on the helmet vizor and then, the moment the officer opened the vizor to be able to see again, have a second protester hiding behind others ram a long pole in his face, which is remarkable not only for the brutality and lawlessness shown, but also for the degree of preparation, proving there were attack teams with specialized tasks.
Now, having given answers, I would like to see some reply in kind, for example on the specific points I raised before, viz. the Nuland/Pyatt intercept, the Ashton/Paet intercept, and the Micalessin interviews of the Georgian Maidan snipers, all of which are “smoking gun” type evidence for who was behind these incidents.
Again, I see people resorting to “flagging” and insults instead of providing reasoned and factual argument. As I've been reminded of the guidelines, well, insults are against those, and some people here appear to abuse the “flag” function to suppress opinions or statements of fact they don't like, which is part of why the HN climate and much of the “discussion” is what it is.
Not even the Russians say that Ukraine started the Donbass war. They are pretty openly celebrating Igor Girkin for starting it with the siege of Sloviansk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sloviansk
You will have to bring some examples of Germans war preparations. They were completely unprepared for Gazproms hostile actions leading up to the war.
Well, if Yanukovych thought that the EU deal was bad, then he should not have campaigned for it. People voted for him to get them closer to the EU and then he betrayed them.
The Nuland/Pyatt call does not seem particularly damning to me. At that time everybody sought solutions to the political dilemma and the famous "fuck the EU" was only to express the intention to work with the UN instead of the EU, because the EU was slow and divided.
In the Ashton Paet call, Paet only said what he had heard the day before. And it was absolutely true that he had heard that the day before. That does not make the content true and nobody claimed that.
The Micalessin interviews seem pretty obvious fake. Documents with many grammatical errors...
The fascinating thing is that Russians are far more comfortable with their imperialistic role than their western supporter and if you read Russian newspaper/watch television/politician speeches it becomes pretty clear that all this discussion is only for western consumption.
You seem to deny there was deception. Okay. There is coherence in justifying deceptive behaviour in order to defend it.
Girkin aka Strelkov has been in jail for over three years for “extremism”, a phony charge (he was criticizing Putin a lot for bad leadership, and continues to do so from jail). Your stating that “the Russians […] are pretty openly celebrating” him seems inadequate; while he does have supporters, they do not “celebrate” because he didn't succeed as he was left to his own devices and did not receive the Kremlin and (para)military support he was hoping for, so had to abandon Slavyansk to Kiev troops.
The initial attack was the Feb 2014 US-led Maidan massacre and coup d'état. Turchinov started the so-called Anti-Terror Operation on April 7th. Strelkov arrived at Slavyansk on April 12th.
I am not aware of any “hostile actions leading up to the war” by Gazprom.
I don't think Yanukovich “betrayed” his voters more than is typical for any so-called democracy. Also, the majority of them were in the Eastern and South-Eastern parts historically close to Russia.
Nuland/Pyatt were discussing whom to appoint to lead the country, proving the USA was behind the coup d'état. The “fuck the EU” bit is of minor importance and just shows US attitude to EU or EU member states' interests, which is perfectly known anyway.
Paet himself had no doubts about the factfulness of what he was relating to Ashton (because he trusted the politically like-minded MD Olga Bogomolets† he'd spoken to, see 49764198=dead), and he was worried (“really disturbing”) that he was on board with something that was against his very own convictions, that is perfectly clear from the tone of his voice. And there is plenty of corroborating evidence, which the CIA/MI6-backed “new coalition” (the perps) chose to ignore, such as videos of people being hit allowing to reconstruct the snipers' position. Avakov etc even had the trees with the bullets in them cut down to destroy the forensic evidence that proved where the shots had been fired from.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olha_Bohomolets – She encouraged her students to take part in the Maidan protests, received honors and positions, ran for president (but no mention of what she revealed to Paet).
I don't know what grammar errors you're referring to, but some of the snipers were interviewed in person, there's a documentary (watched it a couple years ago so don't remember any “grammar errors”):
The Russian propaganda you're referring to is for internal consumption, of course they are in cope mode and try to instill confidence in their own population because their situation is very difficult and their leadership showed amazing incompetence in assessing the situation prior to the Feb 2022 invasion, and sent in their troops with guidelines for a “special military operation” (which they reckoned it would be, a matter of days) and not for the deadly war it turned out to be.
Russian incompetence of stupidly marching into the trap, however, does not vindicate the other side, led by the US and the UK, who laid out the trap in the first place, in an elaborate strategic threat and deception involving, among other things, a “con game” to encourage the Kremlin into taking an action it wouldn't have dared to take. The US and their vassals who also invested into this operation sought precisely this kind of war with Ukrainians/Russians on both sides paying with their blood in order for the profit to flow to the US (in order to MAGA) by draining Europe (Germany being the main loser, of course).
Being clever certainly helps in being a war-profiteering bloodsucker, but it doesn't ma...
Where they attacked because they wanted in on NATO, or the reverse?
"I need to attack Ukraine because you're trying to get it into NATO, at which point attacking it is impossible/much harder." ~Putin, probably
NATO can be criticized for a lot, Afghanistan for example, but despite hearing the argument that Russia attacking Ukraine is NATOs fault, it's never been coherent.
They weren't attacked before trying to join NATO, if that's what you mean. It goes back to 2005 at least. In 2008, Germany blocked both countries' NATO bids because they considered it aggressive against Russia.
I still don't follow. Is the assertion that the non-"neutrality" of NATO membership/alignment would mean a direct threat to Russia somehow? Because the only coherent read I can make is that the only honest objection would be that Russia would lose their ability to attack Ukraine, as well as Ukraine probably growing better resistance to vassal influence, as seen in Georgia.
It's all circular reasoning trying to claim otherwise. "Neutrality" would be letting Ukraine fend for it self while Russia aggressively attacks their elections and implants stooges, which I frankly find absurd. Do I believe the US does something similar less crudely? Yes. Do I believe the EU or any other NATO member does? Hardly.
Russian security thinking is largely shaped by the invasions of Napoleon and Hitler, which caused terrible destruction. The biggest thing they are afraid of is an invasion from the west. That led to a doctrine, where Russia tries to surround itself with allies and puppets. When the next invasion comes, they can then start fighting against it well outside Russian territory, which should limit the damage to Russia itself.
Under that doctrine, if you are a European country bordering Russia, your duty is to help defending Russia. You can choose whether you do that as an ally or a puppet, but you are not allowed to make any other choices.
That's not reasonable fear, given what Europe became after WW2, but it's what Russian leaders expect. Especially those of Putin's generation, who spent their early lives preparing for a possible NATO invasion that could start WW3.
Finland and the USSR had a defensive treaty that, among other things, obligated Finland to fight against NATO if it tried to use Finnish territory or airspace to attack the USSR. There was also a Soviet military base near Helsinki that was supposed to be there until 1994. But after Khrushchev rose to power, the Soviets decided to return it for a number of reasons.
After the USSR fell, Finland deliberately stayed out of NATO in order to maintain a good relationship with Russia. Because the popular support for NATO membership was very low, Russia apparently believed Finnish intentions. Even in late 2021, only ~25% of Finns supported joining NATO. (Six months later, that number was ~75%.)
Aside from the defense agreement, NATO has implications for weapons, foreign bases, intelligence, and cooperation in wars. Putting that in two countries bordering Russia would be leverage. USA would likewise not respond nicely to Mexico joining CSTO (well also if CSTO weren't a joke).
Sure, I understand the reasoning if we assume that Russia is only reactive, US is doing it out of expansionism, and Ukraine is entirely persuadable. I disagree with all those assumptions (in context).
The question isn't why the US wants something, or why Russia wants something, it's why Ukraine wanted/wants to join NATO/EU. If you believe that's purely from US/west pressure, then agree to disagree I guess, but I'm trying to be persuaded it's not because of constant Russian aggression going back decades.
I'm assuming both Russia and US had imperialist goals. Ukraine did in fact start trying to join NATO because of vague Russian threats over Crimea all the way back in the 90s. I still think the US escalated things by pursuing such strong Ukraine-NATO cooperation, especially after 2008. Yes Ukraine had their own agency, but the two empires' diplomacy matters more.
Not sure why exactly Georgia left CSTO and started aligning with NATO in 1999. Seems they realized CSTO was a joke because it wasn't actually protecting their territory from separatist movements.
Supporting Ukraine in Crimea would have been the right thing to do but in 2014 the US was extremely war weary. Despite his dovishness with Russia, conservatives still love to claim Obama was a war monger.
If you want to claim the Biden administration rested on its laurels in 2022, you were either not paying attention or are not participating in good faith.
>It looks like it started to plummet in April 2022, which was on Biden's watch. It apparently was in response to supply chain shocks spiking oil prices due to the start of the war in Ukraine.
it wasn't simply supply chain shocks, it was supply chain shocks in a time of rampant inflation caused by the endless stimulus checks and programs after Covid.
Supply chain shocks cause "legitimate" price increases, it's not "too many dollars chasing too few goods", rather the value of each dollar simply doesn't stretch as far any more, and while trying to hold the line on prices is a fool's errand, trying to make that case to the public in a time of rampant inflation is not going to succeed either
Insofar as I can tell what's really reflected here is a difference between Democrat and Republican policy positions. The Democrats want to minimize domestic environmental impact and be a net oil importer. Let someone else handle the dirty work of drilling. The Republicans are less concerned with the environmental impact and want to increase exports, oil jobs and economic sovereignty. With higher domestic production and less dependence on foreign states, such a large petroleum reserve is unnecessary.
I prefer the Republican position. It sucks to harm the environment. But it sucks more to enable some of the regimes we import oil from. They frequently are not close allies. We frequently end up immersing ourself in wars and other entanglements over this foreign oil. You want to stop the wars, you have to stop the dependence on imported oil. (To be clear I'm not arguing that Republicans will start less wars. I am arguing in favor of domestic oil production because it takes away a justification for them.)
The Democratic position exports the moral hazard to a place where Americans don't see it. Takes it out of their backyard. But frankly that is an immoral approach which both parties have taken repeatedly and it has undermined the health of the nation. The other case where this takes place at an absolutely massive scale is exporting certain types of jobs to other countries where labor standards are lax, and where slave labor takes place. People out there killed themselves while making iPhone or your shoes because the working conditions in those countries were so horrible. I am willing to pay a little more for shoes and buy a little bit fewer luxury goods so that I don't enable slave labor. Move the jobs back onshore where we can regulate the well being of the workers. We can't control it if it's in another country.
Your position appears to be based on crude production and drawing an equivalency between Middle East crude and US crude. They are unfortunately not equivalent. I agree that it’s amazing that the US doesn’t wholly depend on the Mideast for oil, but until we can process our own crude as cheaply as Mideast crude can be processed, strife in the Middle East will still push energy prices up.
Even top Democrats supported natural gas fracking.
"
President Barack Obama used his State of the Union speech to underscore the role of natural gas in transitioning to a lower-carbon nation, the White House indicated tonight.
According to a White House briefing document issued in conjunction with the speech, Obama’s agenda for natural gas includes a call for Congress to work with the administration to create new “Sustainable Shale Gas Growth Zones” to help “regions come together to make sure shale gas is developed in a safe, responsible way that helps build diverse and resilient regional economies that can withstand boom-and-bust cycles and can be leaders in building and deploying clean energy technologies.”
Beware of well written statements that mask their fallacies. As a sibling comment points out, domestic oil production rose plenty during the Biden administration. Casting it as a democrat vs republican difference isn’t anywhere near the full story.
Eloquent prose and respectful delivery is very much appreciated, but I think the facts presented are somewhere between outright falsehoods and misinterpretations.
The comment:
1. Misrepresents Democrats’ stated positions and omits their relevant energy priorities.
2. Isn’t well-informed about the global oil market, how oil gets refined in different regions and how pricing works. I.e., the US is already a huge oil producer with a surplus but this didn’t stop a Middle East conflict from spiking oil prices.
3. Talks about onshoring energy production as a way to curb slave labor despite the oil extraction industry representing very few jobs. Only about 115,000 Americans work in oil and gas extraction in the entire country. This point is kind of just quietly irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Posts which appear to be thoughtfully constructed while actually just being entirely incorrect about the relevant facts are the most important to downvote, to signal to uninformed readers that they should perhaps not trust the post overly much.
There is no political strategy story to be read into the drawdown of the SPR. Biden ("the democrats") drew it down by an even larger amount right after the invasion of Ukraine to stabilize prices, and now before it recovered Trump is drawing it down even further to stabilize prices from his new war.
Of course, the major difference is that Biden was responding to Russia invading Ukraine while Trump was responding to a conflict that he caused and started.
This is not really supported by energy data. Under Biden/Harris, US crude production hit multiple consecutive all time highs and made the country a net exporter since 2020. In my world, that's the opposite of "minimizing domestic drilling." And producing oil doesn't prevent foreign wars; oil is a global commodity, energy markets are subject to global pricing events and disruptions anywhere drive up fuel prices in the US. Prices at the pump here don't care where crude was pumped. And the strange connection you draw between energy policy/oil reserves and offshore factory conditions conflates drastically different economic drivers. There is a real moral conversation to be had here about supply chain ethics but it doesn't get connected this way. This is a really shallow, cliche framing about [drilling vs importing] rather than [fossil fuel dominance vs clean energy transition], and drawing a preference to a party based on a faulty view of those is, disappointingly, Peak Political Affiliation 2026.
Let's also not pretend that the current Republican administration's insane military campaign to disrupt oil supply and markets, isn't helpful to, I don't know, say, Kremlin's oil and gas export revenues, and say, how higher global benchmark crude helps to, say, finance a domestic war economy while buffering against sanctions. Just a tiny thought to consider when holding a preference for Republican oil strategy.
This is not telling the full story. Biden tried to block new oil and gas leases, but he was blocked from doing so by the courts. Oil production was up not because of, but rather in spite of the Biden administration.
Isn't US domestic oil exported to EU and others because its medium to light crude which US refineries are not calibrated for? Its my understanding US refineries are calibrated to refine Heavy crude which comes mainly from Canada and some from Venezuela.
US refineries are highly configurable and can refine any crude. They make more money refining difficult crude because they have the capability to handle it and many refineries do not, so naturally they prefer it for profitability reasons. The difference is extra refining steps that can be bypassed if they are not needed. Processing light sweet crude means some of their capital assets are sitting idle because they aren’t needed.
The US also exports its own crude for blending with other crude at foreign refineries. A refinery may not be able to process some types of crude but can process that crude if blended with a different type of crude to change its average properties. The limit to this for refineries is the cost of buying and shipping enough suitable blending crude to the refinery.
If the Republicans actually had that position instead of being funded heavily by oil money they would be #1 Super Top Solar/Green energy party because that is the path to energy independence and to truly reduce the influence of OPEC - even outside of the fact that peak oil is over and it will continue to get more and more expensive to pull oil out of the earth. But they’re not because your assumptions are misplaced.
I don't think your interpretation of Democrat policies is correct. I've seen nothing regarding a desire to import oil rather than produce it domestically, something that is fundamentally different from declining to expand domestic production (we are already a net exporter after all).
The democrat position is more of, move off of oil to electrification, such that despite no expansion we never have to import, while simultaneously reducing that domestic impact.
About 40-45% of US petroleum use is burning it in passenger cars.
We're already a net exporter of oil; if we pushed a bigger fraction of cars and other transport uses to electrification we'd be a massive net exporter.
That wouldn't completely insulate us from global energy markets but it'd do a lot.
>The counterpoint is that the US is producing more crude domestically than ever with more efficient drilling technology:
From my understanding they are running refineries at max utilization and not able to do required maintenance due to this crisis. This is what worries me about the October surprise. A couple of well timed "screw ups" caused by lack of maintenance when the whole system is already at its breaking point can spell trouble.
In relation to your first paragraph, do you think that in the world as a whole moving forward into the future there will be more economic growth in oil or in energy sectors involving solar, wind, batteries, and nuclear? How do you reconcile the economic potential of oil against the market data involving renewables? I.e., the reality of the data is showing that solar plus grid scale batteries are quickly on track to become cheaper than oil could ever promise to be, and that electric vehicles are clearly on track to beat gasoline in total cost of ownership.
Can we look at what China is doing and say that oil production is the growing future rather than a slowly declining industry with superior emerging alternatives?
Moving on to your second paragraph, isn’t oil dependence a big part of the cause with importing oil from problematic regimes? In other words, you can achieve energy independence by producing more energy, or using less energy. Energy in, energy out.
In that sense, don’t you think the Republican strategy leaves a lot to be desired? E.g., they just this week axed vehicle fuel efficiency standards, they aren’t encouraging domestic battery/EV manufacturing, they are against public transit projects, they are pro-suburb, pro-automobile, anti-urbanism, etc. I remember when John Kasich blocked high speed rail in Ohio, and the federal government was going to give them the funding! You drive between Cleveland and Columbus on I-71 and you’ll notice that it’s a 3-lane road for the entire 2-hour stretch and the traffic congestion never lets up unless it’s the middle of the night.
Domestic oil production is theoretically a solution but the global market isn’t really isolated like that. Even if America decides to be self-sufficient that doesn’t mean that prices will be low. Prices are low for goods when there is a widespread surplus of supplies. If the Iran war can spike gasoline prices almost double as they have in the past year or so, how will domestic production ever make up for that?
Finally, regarding your stance on slave labor. Perhaps we can make a positive argument to say that tariffs may in theory encourage more domestic production, bringing more goods production to a country with stronger labor laws. But now we are facing the cruel irony of US states moving the opposite direction on workers rights, doing things like toying with the idea of relaxing child labor laws. [1]
How good are US labor standards, really? This is a country with zero guaranteed paid parental leave, zero guaranteed paid time off (except in a small amount of states that have a minimum standard exceeding the federal standard — blue states like Illinois), and over 20 million residents with no health insurance coverage as well as the highest medical bankruptcy rate in the world.
When we talk about slave labor, are we talking about basic necessary medical care being conditional on continued employment? Are we talking about mothers going back to work 3 months after giving birth or sooner? Because that is America.
Fun fact: China has more mandatory paid holidays and leave days than the US.
This comment is like a foreshadowing of the next political social media trend.
First it was “leopards ate my farm,” next it’s going to be “leopards ate my oil field.”
I can see the TikToks now: ”I voted for Trump because he was going to help oil workers! But now my rig is shutting down because everyone is buying hybrids and EVs!”
I sincerely encourage you to vote for Republicans if you think the last two years have gone well.
> The counterpoint is that the US is producing more crude domestically than ever with more efficient drilling technology:
Your link doesn't back up your claim that it's more efficient. And believing that fracking is "more efficient" than simply drilling into a pressurized gusher pocket is a boggling conclusion.
I heard John Mearshimer say on a podcast that ~230k barrels, you can't go lower without damaging the caverns the oil is stored in, so we're pretty close to it being over.
More directly, the US uses over 30 million acres to grow corn for biofuels. That's over 40,000 square miles, if I did my math right.
As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol points out, "Growing corn to fuel internal combustion vehicles is a highly inefficient use of land. A solar farm generating electricity to power an electric vehicle would power around 85 times as much distance as corn ethanol grown on the same area."
The other 30,000 square miles -- 3/4th of it -- is still available for farming. And it isn't like solar panels can only be placed on existing farmland. I've seen a lot of rooftop and backyard solar installed around where I live.
If there is a global supply chain collapse, then the price of fossil fuels will likely go through the roof, placing a greater demand for substitutes like ethanol, which will raise the price of food and feed crops as farmers switch to produce the more profitable fuel crops. Or if the government orders the farmers to only produce corn for livestock and people, then there's no effective fuel substitute.
What keeps the land fertile is not the corn monoculture of places like Iowa, but rather a massive amount of fertilizer. As we know from the US war with Iran, fertilizer availability is subject to a global supply chain collapse because the current production methods require a lot of fossil fuel for power.
If you want to reduce your dependency on the global fertilizer supply chain, you'll need a lot of cheap local power to make things like anhydrous ammonia locally.
The experience with agrivoltaics shows that solar power and agriculture can coexist profitably on the same land. At the very least it's not simply a one-or-the-other option, or as you characterized it, "is gone".
If you really want to keeps millions of acres land fertile to handle a possible future economic crisis, you should want severe limits on building new urban and low-density residential development on farmland. If you turn farmland into a suburb, that farmland is far more "gone", for agricultural purposes, than setting up solar panels.
The paper at https://farmlandinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/... estimates well over 10 million acres of agricultural land lost that way by 2040, which at 15,000+ square miles is far more than the quoted 10,000 square miles needed to get rid of most oil use.
So it seems to me that for your goal of making the US less affected by a global supply chain collapse, you should want to have a lot more PV farms.
So seriously, what is the administrations intention here? They’ve used all the missiles and drained all the gas. Are they trying to get the U.S. invaded?
Project 2025 fairly implicitly stated that the idea was to scuttle trust in the US government so badly that there would be a case for private equity to swoop in and save the day.
That's what you're seeing.
> Project 2025 fairly implicitly stated that the idea was to scuttle trust in the US government so badly that there would be a case for private equity to swoop in and save the day. That's what you're seeing.
Could you quote the exact text you're interpreting here?
(Not the whole Project 2025 text; the specific sentence that says that.)
Heritage Foundation has long advocated for emptying the reserves. They wrote Project 2025 but I'm not sure it was an explicit goal in the actual blueprint we got to see
Most of the draw down was after Russia invaded Ukraine. This drawdown is a swap of 1 barrel now for 1.25 barrels later. So the intention is to keep prices down now and get more oil back later for "free".
It's actually shocking that so many comments don't know that the biggest draw -by far- happened under the Biden administration largely as a result of the Ukrainian War. In 2020 when the SPR wasn't full and oil was literally negative, Congress blocked the administration from buying oil to fill it. Instead they used the SPR for short term storage for oil companies (which was not the administration's original proposal.)
I get the Iran war part (though the bigger issue there is middle distillerates rather then crude atm), but people were screaming about the SPR drawdown, and lack of buying for 4 years before Trump ever got back into office; and it fell completely on deaf ears.
> lack of buying for 4 years before Trump ever got back into office; and it fell completely on deaf ears.
So Jan 2021-Feb 2022 Biden didn't top up the SPR, something that definitely makes sense given the fiscal situation.
From Feb 2022 onwards, oil prices spiked because Russia invaded Ukraine. People started putting stupid "I did this" stickers on gas pumps and Biden drew from the SPR when it was nowhere near empty.
Trump doesn't refill it, with both houses of Congress, then starts a war with a nation who every military analyst knows could close a huge oil passageway.
The Biden administration (and other countries around the world in the International Energy Agency) released reserves to try to stabilize the spikes in prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
> On March 1, 2022, Secretary Granholm announced that the U.S. and its partners in the International Energy Agency (IEA) would release a total of 60 million barrels of oil onto the world market. [snip] In total, DOE released 180 million barrels of crude oil into the market.
War with one of the world's largest oil producers? And sanctions about that oil? And Europe becoming almost entirely dependent on middle east and US oil instead? And the blowing up of a massive pipeline?
I am frankly a bit bewildered by all this. The US administration lies and lies. The Iranians lie. Doomers keep talking about how gas prices will skyrocket "in two weeks". Occasionally the "everything is fine, nothing to see here" folks wheel out some journalist saying there will be a peace deal any day now.
It's pretty difficult to figure out what the reality is besides "not good".
Check Polymarket. It's vastly more informative than news, let alone rhetoric from any side.
Everything is hyperbolized, but everything is also true. The Iran war is going horrifically and will likely destabilize oil prices for the foreseeable future. If nothing changes, it'd be catastrophic, but it will change. If necessary OPEC or Russia can be offered sweet deals to stabilize availability, the US could simply sign a favorable (for Iran) deal while waving a white flag emblazoned with "Mission Successful - Nukes Destroyed!" And so on.
So gas prices will not skyrocket, but they will also not stabilize. The current US administration will likely do poorly in the midterms, but that will probably change much less than might be expected. The political establishment loves war, and a war that's going badly puts them in a favorable position for a follow-up victory in 2028, which will otherwise be much closer to a typical coinflip. Though even with the Iran War still ongoing, it'd probably be a coinflip. Yay for polarization.
Anyhow, yeah. The world doesn't end with a bang, but a whimper.
> US could simply sign a favorable (for Iran) deal while waving a white flag emblazoned with "Mission Successful
Trump is constitutionally[1] unable to do that. He cant compromise or look weak, or it'll conjure the ghost of Fred Trump calling him a loser one more time. Ironically, this fear of losing is how becomes a loser: first against(!) Covid-19, when he thought wearing a mask made him look weak, and now against Iran.
It'll be framed as a victory with some long speech about how we've secured the nukes, guaranteed the safety of the free world, liberty, democracy, blah blah blah.
It was higher in price at the peak of the Russia-Ukraine disruptions but that's because it was already coming off Covid-related supply chain disruptions. It rose more from Iran war than it did from the Russia war.
Ok, but if the SPR runs out... that would be a much larger spike, right? That's what some of the doomers keep talking about. Maybe they're correct... I don't know.
The reserve is effectively empty at 250M-300M barrels, and currently sits at 284M. The rapid deceleration to 400K could mean that there’s no quick way to keep withdrawing the remaining reserves.
I asked Claude to research for me so don’t take this as truth but it sounds like
(a) as the levels drop below 300M barrels, pumping out of the reserve is much less efficient, so we can’t necessarily draw it down as quickly as when it’s full. So the lower it gets, the less useful it is
And (b) there are a lot of varying estimates for the real effective floor, anywhere from the 180ish to 300M barrels is within the range of a safe minimum level.
What I've read is that, the SPR was designed for a 25 year lifetime and 5 purge/fill cycles. It's now at 40 years and dozens of purge/fills, so it's way out of it's design parameters.
The problem is that as you pump oil and water in and out of it, in the intervening layer between the salt water and oil there forms a water/oil/impurities sludge which is useless (it ruins the pumping equipment). The thing is, they have no way of measuring it, nobody knows how much good oil is left and how much is sludge (or if they do, none of that information is public). And the closer you get to the sludge, the harder the good oil is to extract, slowing down the extraction pace.
Essentially the Iran war is to control (i.e. reduce) oil going to China. As long as the straight of hormuz being closed restricts oil being sold/sent to China, tRump doesn't give a damn about other shortages as a result of the closure such as fertilizer which will see food skyrocket in price and many people starve.
They would have recharged the reserves if that was really the reason and they would have readied themselves to the upcoming closure. They didn't expect the strait to be closed and got caught with their pants way down. Using the SPR is just another sign of how incompetent and out of options they are. It was already on a low level when the war started due to the previous withdrawals from the Russian war.
You seem to basically understand that Trump is a chaotic fool yet you've still bought into the 4D chess explanation for this war.
Ignoring the reality that he let himself be talked into the Iran war by Israel, over strong US military objections. And suggesting instead he's secretly starting a war with China by cutting off oil to the entire far east.
A move which has only strengthened Chinas power in the region.
The worldwide adoption of EV's has done 0 to affect Oil/Gas markets.
Civilian market autos are a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to heavy industry, tankers, aircraft and rail RE; consumption and demand draw.
Your posit of the mile battery bank and solar farm is certainly not "incorrect", but the tragedy of the commons and resource distrobution is a classical problem that would inevitabally lead to exactly the same situation.
If it can be used somewhere in place of other oil, then they can send the compatible oil to the reserve. So is this what Trump means by US oil companies returning 1.25 barrels for each 1 they take? Doubt he's really thought it through.
It's sour crude that requires special infrastructure that our oil companies don't even want to bother investing in. They told Trump as much, he still kidnapped President Maduro, who is as far as I know, still in New York City.
There's already US infrastructure to process sour crude from Mexico. Who said this is a problem? When I search this, I see that Exxon's CEO called it uninvestible due to geopolitical risks, but Chevron claimed to be ready to go ahead.
US is actually really good at processing that type of crude. Much better than the oil we drill domestically. Don't forget that US oil companies used to dominate Venezuela. In 1976, Venezuela bought out the companies and paid them what they claimed they were worth on their financial/tax ledgers. Ofc all the companies massively deflated their worth to avoid taxes so this angered them and they've never really stopped complaining about it.
Trump has basically enacted their revenge for that.
You have your facts backward. The US refineries are famous for being some of the best in the world at refining sour crude. It is why so many countries ship their sour (and other difficult) crudes to the US for refining.
US refinery capacity is much larger than its world-leading oil production. Oil refining is a major export business for the US.
How quickly could it realistically be replenished if some kind of detente were reached and supply roughly returned to where it is was? Would replenishment contribute significantly to price pressure?
If you retain any hope of the cessation of hostilities in the US's war with Iran causing a sudden and large dip in fuel prices, just remember that these stocks need to be rebuilt when all is said and done. And the US isn't the only country with rapidly depleting stocks requiring a post-war rebuild. Refining capacity aside -- there's a long road ahead for high prices.
Strategic petroleum reserves work best when there's strategy behind that which depletes them. It's difficult to see the US's strategy behind exposing itself in this way.
It's worth pointing out that these are stored across ~60 salt caverns that were built to do a max of 5 drawdowns. All of them are now at about 9 drawdowns and there's every drawdown introduces serious structural integrity issues. We will never be able to completely empty them but the actual floor is debated.
The previous head of the reserves said we "couldn't realistically go below 300m". The Dept. of Energy requires at least 250m in the reserves for emergencies. Some other have estimated we could go as low as 70m.
It's entirely possible that we've already just about reached the minimum.
The very lowest layer of oil also has more sediment mixing issues and requires more processing to be useful.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 55.4 ms ] threadhttps://en.macromicro.me/charts/41674/us-strategic-petroleum...
People jump over the details in normal times, but then times get abnormal and impossible things start to happen.
Having the AI summarize the pros and cons of that action has valid points on both sides. But in his defense, that particular war was not of our doing, unlike the current war with Iran which was initiated impulsively.
Well... arguably it is partially our doing. Not for the reason's Tucker Carlson & Russia say, but that Obama and later Biden totally sat on their laurels after the Crimean invasion, totally paralyzed by fear of escalation and political fallout.
That said, Putin's gonna do what Putin's gonna do and it likely wasn't the Crimean invasion that prompted it. It was the promise of waltzing in and just taking it without resistance.
On top of that, 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, which means that all of the foreign policy people had been brushing up on their histories of World War I and the causes of said war, which is of course the ur-example of "random event escalates to every great power at war with each other." I definitely felt like a lone voice pointing out that I was getting more World War II vibes, with Putin acting like Hitler: "I just want a little bit of X, it's the last thing I'll ask for, I promise!"
Also, probably more important than the US reaction here is the German reaction, and Germany was in full Russian appeasement mode really right up until Russian tanks were literally rolling across the border in 2022.
People who make a big point about "Crimea is Ukraine!" are either ignorant or ideological, objectively it's at best debatable.
(And really, there should be no slavs there at all and it should be given back to the Tatars, if anyone really wants to get into the morals...)
But if Ukraine became prosperous and democratic it would make Putin look bad. Think West Germany against East Germany.
My point is the 1991 borders are somewhat arbitrary: they were originally internal administrative divisions inside a larger centralised state.
They don't necessarily represent a natural long term international border, and attaching huge moral significance to the specific strokes of a Soviet bureaucrat's pen is strange
Crimea even declared independence from the Ukraine in the first half of the 1990s.
« [WWI] the ur-example of "random event escalates to every great power at war with each other." » — It was neither a random event nor everyone at war with each other. Rather, Britain had started building an alliance wo wage war on Germany more than ten years before (Entente cordiale 1904, Triple entente 1907), and there was nothing “random” or “sleepwalking” (Clarke) about it. It was all very systematic, see Docherty & Macgregor, “Hidden History”.
« Germany was in full Russian appeasement mode » — Germany, as Russia's key partner, was in full deception mode, and while I think that in early 2015 Merkel still tried to avert and counter the US preparations to start a war about the Ukraine, not exactly being a strong leader, she folded under US pressure/terror (her “shaking attacks” perhaps somehow related), and then curiously renounced office and withdrew in 2021, because she definitely knew what was coming and probably didn't want to handle it. And if you listen to the Bundestag special Sunday session of Feb 25, 2022, it is patently clear, by the extent of what was announced, that there had been at least month-long preparations for this speaking event.
From my experience on this site, people will probably just “flag” this comment, but with a modicum of good will (which regrettably seem to be a scarce resource here) an interesting discussion (for “curiosity's” sake) could be held about how the Russian leadership, encouraged by an elaborate “con game” (where “con” stands for “confidence”), stupidly marched into the giant bear trap that had been prepared, of course under US leadership (hashtag #TrainToWin), starting at the latest in 2014, following the Maidan massacre and “most blatant coup in history” (some US observer whose name I'm forgetting), which was the true beginning of the war, cf. hired snipers interviewed by Gian Micalessin, Pyatt/Nuland and Ashton/Paet leaks (49761459=flgd, 49764198=dead), which should remind everyone that the US was not an innocent bystander but the key organizer of the Ukraine war, which incidentally is highly beneficial to the US and highly detrimental in a strategic sense to Germany, which continues to suffer from the usual weakness in leadership and inability or unwillingness to stand up.
I'm not interested and won't participate in any extended “flame wars” about this topic (or any other), but it would be good to see a reasoned argument instead of “flagging” and insults (which frankly is a kind of intellectual bankruptcy). I was told (49841897) that while “minority views” were appreciated on HN, special care had to be taken when presenting these in order not to “weaponize” them and enter “battle mode”, which is not my intention. Rather, it is to see an honest debate of an interesting topic, which in theory is possible.
It was Russia that prepared for the invasion when they stopped supplying the gas spot market in summer 2021 and later rented gas storage but let it empty. In preparation to blackmail Germany. That didn't work out when Xi did not allow the invasion to start before his winter Olympics ended, though.
As for the Maidan revolution. Yanukovych ran on a pro EU platform with the EU association agreement as a main goal. A few days before signing it he got bought of by Putin, declared the agreement dead and called for a custom zone with Belarus and Russia. No shit did people go the streets and protested.
How exactly did the US get Yanukovych to renege on his campaign promises and start the protests?
The German govs were also behaving deceptively in making various sorts of war preparations (energy, sanctions, seizures, even culture war) while feigning to only care for peace. This is all the more strange as Germany (apart from the Ukraine and Russia) is the main loser in this war, as it would have stood to prosper from a stable and positive relationship with Russia, countering the US war agenda for Europe, and even removing US/UK control over Ukraine (subsequent to the 2014 coup d'êtat), which obviously they didn't dare to attempt.
Yanukovych, corrupt though he may have been, thought that the EU deal was detrimental to his country, and the Russian offer more generous and flexible. That was the reason he didn't sign.
The US organized the “protests” (the likes of which would have been severely crushed by armed police in France or Germany as “terrorist uprising” or some such) by training rioters in camps in the Baltics and (I think) Poland. You could see on video that the “protesters” would attack police in trained manœuvers, for example by spraying foam or soap on the helmet vizor and then, the moment the officer opened the vizor to be able to see again, have a second protester hiding behind others ram a long pole in his face, which is remarkable not only for the brutality and lawlessness shown, but also for the degree of preparation, proving there were attack teams with specialized tasks.
Now, having given answers, I would like to see some reply in kind, for example on the specific points I raised before, viz. the Nuland/Pyatt intercept, the Ashton/Paet intercept, and the Micalessin interviews of the Georgian Maidan snipers, all of which are “smoking gun” type evidence for who was behind these incidents.
Again, I see people resorting to “flagging” and insults instead of providing reasoned and factual argument. As I've been reminded of the guidelines, well, insults are against those, and some people here appear to abuse the “flag” function to suppress opinions or statements of fact they don't like, which is part of why the HN climate and much of the “discussion” is what it is.
What are the the concrete Minsk obligations the Germans violated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements
Not even the Russians say that Ukraine started the Donbass war. They are pretty openly celebrating Igor Girkin for starting it with the siege of Sloviansk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sloviansk
You will have to bring some examples of Germans war preparations. They were completely unprepared for Gazproms hostile actions leading up to the war.
Well, if Yanukovych thought that the EU deal was bad, then he should not have campaigned for it. People voted for him to get them closer to the EU and then he betrayed them.
The Nuland/Pyatt call does not seem particularly damning to me. At that time everybody sought solutions to the political dilemma and the famous "fuck the EU" was only to express the intention to work with the UN instead of the EU, because the EU was slow and divided.
In the Ashton Paet call, Paet only said what he had heard the day before. And it was absolutely true that he had heard that the day before. That does not make the content true and nobody claimed that.
The Micalessin interviews seem pretty obvious fake. Documents with many grammatical errors...
The fascinating thing is that Russians are far more comfortable with their imperialistic role than their western supporter and if you read Russian newspaper/watch television/politician speeches it becomes pretty clear that all this discussion is only for western consumption.
Girkin aka Strelkov has been in jail for over three years for “extremism”, a phony charge (he was criticizing Putin a lot for bad leadership, and continues to do so from jail). Your stating that “the Russians […] are pretty openly celebrating” him seems inadequate; while he does have supporters, they do not “celebrate” because he didn't succeed as he was left to his own devices and did not receive the Kremlin and (para)military support he was hoping for, so had to abandon Slavyansk to Kiev troops.
The initial attack was the Feb 2014 US-led Maidan massacre and coup d'état. Turchinov started the so-called Anti-Terror Operation on April 7th. Strelkov arrived at Slavyansk on April 12th.
I am not aware of any “hostile actions leading up to the war” by Gazprom.
I don't think Yanukovich “betrayed” his voters more than is typical for any so-called democracy. Also, the majority of them were in the Eastern and South-Eastern parts historically close to Russia.
Nuland/Pyatt were discussing whom to appoint to lead the country, proving the USA was behind the coup d'état. The “fuck the EU” bit is of minor importance and just shows US attitude to EU or EU member states' interests, which is perfectly known anyway.
Paet himself had no doubts about the factfulness of what he was relating to Ashton (because he trusted the politically like-minded MD Olga Bogomolets† he'd spoken to, see 49764198=dead), and he was worried (“really disturbing”) that he was on board with something that was against his very own convictions, that is perfectly clear from the tone of his voice. And there is plenty of corroborating evidence, which the CIA/MI6-backed “new coalition” (the perps) chose to ignore, such as videos of people being hit allowing to reconstruct the snipers' position. Avakov etc even had the trees with the bullets in them cut down to destroy the forensic evidence that proved where the shots had been fired from.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olha_Bohomolets – She encouraged her students to take part in the Maidan protests, received honors and positions, ran for president (but no mention of what she revealed to Paet).
I don't know what grammar errors you're referring to, but some of the snipers were interviewed in person, there's a documentary (watched it a couple years ago so don't remember any “grammar errors”):
Esclusivo Guerra in Ucraina, le verità nascoste • https://youtu.be/YI_eaMtsOz4
The Russian propaganda you're referring to is for internal consumption, of course they are in cope mode and try to instill confidence in their own population because their situation is very difficult and their leadership showed amazing incompetence in assessing the situation prior to the Feb 2022 invasion, and sent in their troops with guidelines for a “special military operation” (which they reckoned it would be, a matter of days) and not for the deadly war it turned out to be.
Russian incompetence of stupidly marching into the trap, however, does not vindicate the other side, led by the US and the UK, who laid out the trap in the first place, in an elaborate strategic threat and deception involving, among other things, a “con game” to encourage the Kremlin into taking an action it wouldn't have dared to take. The US and their vassals who also invested into this operation sought precisely this kind of war with Ukrainians/Russians on both sides paying with their blood in order for the profit to flow to the US (in order to MAGA) by draining Europe (Germany being the main loser, of course).
Being clever certainly helps in being a war-profiteering bloodsucker, but it doesn't ma...
see for example https://bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/post/3munb...
"I need to attack Ukraine because you're trying to get it into NATO, at which point attacking it is impossible/much harder." ~Putin, probably
NATO can be criticized for a lot, Afghanistan for example, but despite hearing the argument that Russia attacking Ukraine is NATOs fault, it's never been coherent.
It's all circular reasoning trying to claim otherwise. "Neutrality" would be letting Ukraine fend for it self while Russia aggressively attacks their elections and implants stooges, which I frankly find absurd. Do I believe the US does something similar less crudely? Yes. Do I believe the EU or any other NATO member does? Hardly.
Under that doctrine, if you are a European country bordering Russia, your duty is to help defending Russia. You can choose whether you do that as an ally or a puppet, but you are not allowed to make any other choices.
That's not reasonable fear, given what Europe became after WW2, but it's what Russian leaders expect. Especially those of Putin's generation, who spent their early lives preparing for a possible NATO invasion that could start WW3.
As you say, I don't buy it as a reasonable fear, but I can at least buy it as a rationalization.
Finland and the USSR had a defensive treaty that, among other things, obligated Finland to fight against NATO if it tried to use Finnish territory or airspace to attack the USSR. There was also a Soviet military base near Helsinki that was supposed to be there until 1994. But after Khrushchev rose to power, the Soviets decided to return it for a number of reasons.
After the USSR fell, Finland deliberately stayed out of NATO in order to maintain a good relationship with Russia. Because the popular support for NATO membership was very low, Russia apparently believed Finnish intentions. Even in late 2021, only ~25% of Finns supported joining NATO. (Six months later, that number was ~75%.)
The question isn't why the US wants something, or why Russia wants something, it's why Ukraine wanted/wants to join NATO/EU. If you believe that's purely from US/west pressure, then agree to disagree I guess, but I'm trying to be persuaded it's not because of constant Russian aggression going back decades.
Not sure why exactly Georgia left CSTO and started aligning with NATO in 1999. Seems they realized CSTO was a joke because it wasn't actually protecting their territory from separatist movements.
If you want to claim the Biden administration rested on its laurels in 2022, you were either not paying attention or are not participating in good faith.
it wasn't simply supply chain shocks, it was supply chain shocks in a time of rampant inflation caused by the endless stimulus checks and programs after Covid.
Supply chain shocks cause "legitimate" price increases, it's not "too many dollars chasing too few goods", rather the value of each dollar simply doesn't stretch as far any more, and while trying to hold the line on prices is a fool's errand, trying to make that case to the public in a time of rampant inflation is not going to succeed either
It's just incredibly dumb to start a war that will tank global petroleum supply chains before stocking back up.
https://www.oilmonster.com/article/more-productive-wells-spu...
Insofar as I can tell what's really reflected here is a difference between Democrat and Republican policy positions. The Democrats want to minimize domestic environmental impact and be a net oil importer. Let someone else handle the dirty work of drilling. The Republicans are less concerned with the environmental impact and want to increase exports, oil jobs and economic sovereignty. With higher domestic production and less dependence on foreign states, such a large petroleum reserve is unnecessary.
I prefer the Republican position. It sucks to harm the environment. But it sucks more to enable some of the regimes we import oil from. They frequently are not close allies. We frequently end up immersing ourself in wars and other entanglements over this foreign oil. You want to stop the wars, you have to stop the dependence on imported oil. (To be clear I'm not arguing that Republicans will start less wars. I am arguing in favor of domestic oil production because it takes away a justification for them.)
The Democratic position exports the moral hazard to a place where Americans don't see it. Takes it out of their backyard. But frankly that is an immoral approach which both parties have taken repeatedly and it has undermined the health of the nation. The other case where this takes place at an absolutely massive scale is exporting certain types of jobs to other countries where labor standards are lax, and where slave labor takes place. People out there killed themselves while making iPhone or your shoes because the working conditions in those countries were so horrible. I am willing to pay a little more for shoes and buy a little bit fewer luxury goods so that I don't enable slave labor. Move the jobs back onshore where we can regulate the well being of the workers. We can't control it if it's in another country.
" President Barack Obama used his State of the Union speech to underscore the role of natural gas in transitioning to a lower-carbon nation, the White House indicated tonight.
According to a White House briefing document issued in conjunction with the speech, Obama’s agenda for natural gas includes a call for Congress to work with the administration to create new “Sustainable Shale Gas Growth Zones” to help “regions come together to make sure shale gas is developed in a safe, responsible way that helps build diverse and resilient regional economies that can withstand boom-and-bust cycles and can be leaders in building and deploying clean energy technologies.”
"
https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-now/2014/01/obama-to...
The comment:
1. Misrepresents Democrats’ stated positions and omits their relevant energy priorities.
2. Isn’t well-informed about the global oil market, how oil gets refined in different regions and how pricing works. I.e., the US is already a huge oil producer with a surplus but this didn’t stop a Middle East conflict from spiking oil prices.
3. Talks about onshoring energy production as a way to curb slave labor despite the oil extraction industry representing very few jobs. Only about 115,000 Americans work in oil and gas extraction in the entire country. This point is kind of just quietly irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Let's also not pretend that the current Republican administration's insane military campaign to disrupt oil supply and markets, isn't helpful to, I don't know, say, Kremlin's oil and gas export revenues, and say, how higher global benchmark crude helps to, say, finance a domestic war economy while buffering against sanctions. Just a tiny thought to consider when holding a preference for Republican oil strategy.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-climate-change-environm...
The US also exports its own crude for blending with other crude at foreign refineries. A refinery may not be able to process some types of crude but can process that crude if blended with a different type of crude to change its average properties. The limit to this for refineries is the cost of buying and shipping enough suitable blending crude to the refinery.
The democrat position is more of, move off of oil to electrification, such that despite no expansion we never have to import, while simultaneously reducing that domestic impact.
We're already a net exporter of oil; if we pushed a bigger fraction of cars and other transport uses to electrification we'd be a massive net exporter.
That wouldn't completely insulate us from global energy markets but it'd do a lot.
From my understanding they are running refineries at max utilization and not able to do required maintenance due to this crisis. This is what worries me about the October surprise. A couple of well timed "screw ups" caused by lack of maintenance when the whole system is already at its breaking point can spell trouble.
Can we look at what China is doing and say that oil production is the growing future rather than a slowly declining industry with superior emerging alternatives?
Moving on to your second paragraph, isn’t oil dependence a big part of the cause with importing oil from problematic regimes? In other words, you can achieve energy independence by producing more energy, or using less energy. Energy in, energy out.
In that sense, don’t you think the Republican strategy leaves a lot to be desired? E.g., they just this week axed vehicle fuel efficiency standards, they aren’t encouraging domestic battery/EV manufacturing, they are against public transit projects, they are pro-suburb, pro-automobile, anti-urbanism, etc. I remember when John Kasich blocked high speed rail in Ohio, and the federal government was going to give them the funding! You drive between Cleveland and Columbus on I-71 and you’ll notice that it’s a 3-lane road for the entire 2-hour stretch and the traffic congestion never lets up unless it’s the middle of the night.
Domestic oil production is theoretically a solution but the global market isn’t really isolated like that. Even if America decides to be self-sufficient that doesn’t mean that prices will be low. Prices are low for goods when there is a widespread surplus of supplies. If the Iran war can spike gasoline prices almost double as they have in the past year or so, how will domestic production ever make up for that?
Finally, regarding your stance on slave labor. Perhaps we can make a positive argument to say that tariffs may in theory encourage more domestic production, bringing more goods production to a country with stronger labor laws. But now we are facing the cruel irony of US states moving the opposite direction on workers rights, doing things like toying with the idea of relaxing child labor laws. [1]
How good are US labor standards, really? This is a country with zero guaranteed paid parental leave, zero guaranteed paid time off (except in a small amount of states that have a minimum standard exceeding the federal standard — blue states like Illinois), and over 20 million residents with no health insurance coverage as well as the highest medical bankruptcy rate in the world.
When we talk about slave labor, are we talking about basic necessary medical care being conditional on continued employment? Are we talking about mothers going back to work 3 months after giving birth or sooner? Because that is America.
Fun fact: China has more mandatory paid holidays and leave days than the US.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/some-lawmakers-propose...
First it was “leopards ate my farm,” next it’s going to be “leopards ate my oil field.”
I can see the TikToks now: ”I voted for Trump because he was going to help oil workers! But now my rig is shutting down because everyone is buying hybrids and EVs!”
I sincerely encourage you to vote for Republicans if you think the last two years have gone well.
Your link doesn't back up your claim that it's more efficient. And believing that fracking is "more efficient" than simply drilling into a pressurized gusher pocket is a boggling conclusion.
It is because of world wide adoption of EVs that the fossil fuel demand has reduced and stabilized gas prices in the US.
See : https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-have-unlo...
But first we’d need to develop four dimensional solar panels
Or nearly all of Maryland?
More directly, the US uses over 30 million acres to grow corn for biofuels. That's over 40,000 square miles, if I did my math right.
As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol points out, "Growing corn to fuel internal combustion vehicles is a highly inefficient use of land. A solar farm generating electricity to power an electric vehicle would power around 85 times as much distance as corn ethanol grown on the same area."
If there is a global supply chain collapse, then the price of fossil fuels will likely go through the roof, placing a greater demand for substitutes like ethanol, which will raise the price of food and feed crops as farmers switch to produce the more profitable fuel crops. Or if the government orders the farmers to only produce corn for livestock and people, then there's no effective fuel substitute.
What keeps the land fertile is not the corn monoculture of places like Iowa, but rather a massive amount of fertilizer. As we know from the US war with Iran, fertilizer availability is subject to a global supply chain collapse because the current production methods require a lot of fossil fuel for power.
If you want to reduce your dependency on the global fertilizer supply chain, you'll need a lot of cheap local power to make things like anhydrous ammonia locally.
The experience with agrivoltaics shows that solar power and agriculture can coexist profitably on the same land. At the very least it's not simply a one-or-the-other option, or as you characterized it, "is gone".
If you really want to keeps millions of acres land fertile to handle a possible future economic crisis, you should want severe limits on building new urban and low-density residential development on farmland. If you turn farmland into a suburb, that farmland is far more "gone", for agricultural purposes, than setting up solar panels.
The paper at https://farmlandinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/... estimates well over 10 million acres of agricultural land lost that way by 2040, which at 15,000+ square miles is far more than the quoted 10,000 square miles needed to get rid of most oil use.
So it seems to me that for your goal of making the US less affected by a global supply chain collapse, you should want to have a lot more PV farms.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-the-strategic-pet...
Could you quote the exact text you're interpreting here?
(Not the whole Project 2025 text; the specific sentence that says that.)
I get the Iran war part (though the bigger issue there is middle distillerates rather then crude atm), but people were screaming about the SPR drawdown, and lack of buying for 4 years before Trump ever got back into office; and it fell completely on deaf ears.
Pretty much everything you've said is true, but it happened in 2022. Biden wasn't even POTUS in 2020.
So Jan 2021-Feb 2022 Biden didn't top up the SPR, something that definitely makes sense given the fiscal situation.
From Feb 2022 onwards, oil prices spiked because Russia invaded Ukraine. People started putting stupid "I did this" stickers on gas pumps and Biden drew from the SPR when it was nowhere near empty.
Trump doesn't refill it, with both houses of Congress, then starts a war with a nation who every military analyst knows could close a huge oil passageway.
> On March 1, 2022, Secretary Granholm announced that the U.S. and its partners in the International Energy Agency (IEA) would release a total of 60 million barrels of oil onto the world market. [snip] In total, DOE released 180 million barrels of crude oil into the market.
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/opr/history-spr-releases (look at 2022 IEA Coordinate Release)
Remember that?
It's pretty difficult to figure out what the reality is besides "not good".
Everything is hyperbolized, but everything is also true. The Iran war is going horrifically and will likely destabilize oil prices for the foreseeable future. If nothing changes, it'd be catastrophic, but it will change. If necessary OPEC or Russia can be offered sweet deals to stabilize availability, the US could simply sign a favorable (for Iran) deal while waving a white flag emblazoned with "Mission Successful - Nukes Destroyed!" And so on.
So gas prices will not skyrocket, but they will also not stabilize. The current US administration will likely do poorly in the midterms, but that will probably change much less than might be expected. The political establishment loves war, and a war that's going badly puts them in a favorable position for a follow-up victory in 2028, which will otherwise be much closer to a typical coinflip. Though even with the Iran War still ongoing, it'd probably be a coinflip. Yay for polarization.
Anyhow, yeah. The world doesn't end with a bang, but a whimper.
Trump is constitutionally[1] unable to do that. He cant compromise or look weak, or it'll conjure the ghost of Fred Trump calling him a loser one more time. Ironically, this fear of losing is how becomes a loser: first against(!) Covid-19, when he thought wearing a mask made him look weak, and now against Iran.
1. His make up, not the document
https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts
It was higher in price at the peak of the Russia-Ukraine disruptions but that's because it was already coming off Covid-related supply chain disruptions. It rose more from Iran war than it did from the Russia war.
(a) as the levels drop below 300M barrels, pumping out of the reserve is much less efficient, so we can’t necessarily draw it down as quickly as when it’s full. So the lower it gets, the less useful it is
And (b) there are a lot of varying estimates for the real effective floor, anywhere from the 180ish to 300M barrels is within the range of a safe minimum level.
The problem is that as you pump oil and water in and out of it, in the intervening layer between the salt water and oil there forms a water/oil/impurities sludge which is useless (it ruins the pumping equipment). The thing is, they have no way of measuring it, nobody knows how much good oil is left and how much is sludge (or if they do, none of that information is public). And the closer you get to the sludge, the harder the good oil is to extract, slowing down the extraction pace.
China stopped/reduced buying, used their large reserves, EVs and now accelerating EV trucks. And also coal to liquids.
Eventually, China may have to start buying and thats when the fun begins.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/business/energy-environme...
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Chinas-Renewable-Boom-Masks...
China is now the world’s great oil power. Forget OPEC. The Chinese Communist Party calls the shots. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49238158
Ignoring the reality that he let himself be talked into the Iran war by Israel, over strong US military objections. And suggesting instead he's secretly starting a war with China by cutting off oil to the entire far east.
A move which has only strengthened Chinas power in the region.
It's recursively stupid all the way down.
It is because of world wide adoption of EVs that the fossil fuel demand has reduced and stabilized gas prices in the US.
See : https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-have-unlo...
Civilian market autos are a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to heavy industry, tankers, aircraft and rail RE; consumption and demand draw.
Your posit of the mile battery bank and solar farm is certainly not "incorrect", but the tragedy of the commons and resource distrobution is a classical problem that would inevitabally lead to exactly the same situation.
Trump has basically enacted their revenge for that.
US refinery capacity is much larger than its world-leading oil production. Oil refining is a major export business for the US.
It is because of world wide adoption of EVs that the fossil fuel demand has reduced and stabilized gas prices in the US.
See : https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-have-unlo...
Its possible Oil price might go higher. Oil Prices Ignore the Warning Signs in Physical Markets: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Prices-Ignore...
Strategic petroleum reserves work best when there's strategy behind that which depletes them. It's difficult to see the US's strategy behind exposing itself in this way.
Oil barrens will now yield even more political leverage not just over trump but also his successors
The previous head of the reserves said we "couldn't realistically go below 300m". The Dept. of Energy requires at least 250m in the reserves for emergencies. Some other have estimated we could go as low as 70m.
It's entirely possible that we've already just about reached the minimum.
The very lowest layer of oil also has more sediment mixing issues and requires more processing to be useful.