• Avatar of Vengeance@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    To compare the energy sovereignty issue, this is like believing the US can actually drill enough to become independent from OPEC countries. (Wouldn’t be alone, this was a popular talking point when the call to Drill Baby Drill was sounded!) The whole point of US drilling is to control the oil market. Actually this is a bad example because the US runs the petrodollar system but no Drill Baby Drill and OPEC cannot save Europe now. Opening up to Russia, China, and Iran and going full Asia mode could. The drilling in Norway and Canada you’re talking about is a price management thing. Oil wells that have more limited stores also become far less efficient to extract the more you pump. To say nothing of crap like tar sands lol

    • jenesaisquoi@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      We will need a lot less oil in the future. Just one example: in my country the typical way to heat a house in winter was oil. We are now transitioning to heat pumps as fast as we possibly can. Another big consumer of oil are vehicles, which are also transitioning to electric. We will still import oil, of course, but much less. It’s not unreasonable to cut out one or two supplier countries if the demand halves.

      • Avatar of Vengeance@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        demand halves

        Stop, I’m going to do a spit take. Look, I would love for Europe to go full solarpunk but that would take sudden growth of industrial capacity beyond its wildest dreams, not maximizing certain tech monopolies and rent seeking in industry. Europe has hitched itself to the US because their dependency relationship (encompassing both US influence and European participation in supply chains mediated by US power, requiring access to undercosted goods from poorer nations) is too important to European political & business leadership to consider industrial development. It’s playing a bad long game because elites can always run somewhere else & they have nothing to do but inherit and die. That’s really the main obstacle here, politics. It feels bad when I hear these common sense solutions combined with neolib premises and jingoism lol, Europe will pass off restrictions on Chinese solar panels, EVs, etc as being sound industrial policy, and you won’t see production increase there or prices drop. Look I may jokingly taunt Euros but it’s almost like you deserve better. Rhetorically you deserve better maybe not karmically