I’m guessing their solution is for us to be even more dependent upon oil?
The issue here is that we based our entire economy around a substance that is incredibly price-volatile, run by a cartel, and is plentiful mostly in places that are unstable or hostile to us. I think it’s crazy that we’ve completely normalized the idea that fuel needs to have prices listed outside a gas station because it changes so frequently. Imagine if supermarkets had to list the price of a loaf of bread outside because it kept changing so often.
And it’s really our own fault (or at least the fault of politicians bought by oil companies) because the dangers of oil dependence were obvious at least back in the 70s.
Braess's/Pigou's Paradox that more car lanes cause more traffic was found in the 1920's. We massively overbuilt for the car regardless and keep getting worse traffic to this day.
> Braess's/Pigou's Paradox that more car lanes cause more traffic was found in the 1920's.
The paradox is that it _can_ cause worse traffic, not that it always does. American cities are built like shit for transport, but it's not as simple as "roads too big, therefore traffic". Sprawl is a much bigger (and more difficult to do ~anything about) issue.
Faster CPUs cause people to run larger programs. Egad! Nobody needs more than 100 MHz! Ban FLOP inflation now before Big Silicon makes us burn any more electricity.
> guessing their solution is for us to be even more dependent upon oil?
They're competent enough to be able to model the demand destruction occuring globally.
In the meantime, given "Canada supplied the U.S. with more than 60 per cent of its crude oil imports last year," Canada's oil bonanza may not only make up for their tariff losses but actually put them into a net surplus [1].
> run by a cartel, and is plentiful mostly in places that are unstable or hostile to us.
If by "we" you mean the United States, it's worth noting that the US is a net exporter of fuel products and our net imports of crude oil have dropped a lot.
> Imagine if supermarkets had to list the price of a loaf of bread outside because it kept changing so often.
This actually happens when prices become volatile. Not long ago I could see the prices of eggs posted outside different stores on my drive home.
There is no apt response other than for the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation to all suddenly change their minds about gay frogs and space lasers and stolen elections. I can’t see it happening.
> There is no apt response other than for the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation
Single-digit percentage points of turnout changes would swing the House and Senate. Double-digit percentage changes in voter turnout, as in 15 to 30 percent of unlikely-to-vote registered voters turning out for Democrats in deep-red Republican stronghods like Alabama and Mississippi, gives Democrats a Congressional supermajority.
MAGA voters aren't dropping their identity for a while. Possibly never. Most voters who aren't registered or don't vote are lazy and nihilstic and worth ignoring. But a tenth should be pitchable. In a reach, a third of them could find motivation.
I'm excited to see all the nutty takes about oil prices from the same people who don't belive in vaccines.
I kinda hope they bring back the old idea that oil is actually formed out of non-biological matter and so that means its just basically infinitly seeping up from the earth, we just have to drill a bit deeper. But I think that's a little too nerdy for them
When I was a kid in the 1980s, the scientific shows and authors all agreed that petroleum was made of dinosaurs. Triceratops and Brontosaurus had died ?? MYA and got compressed into the oil we're drilling for today.
It was only about 3 years ago when I learned that petroleum comes from almost anything organic. So, ferns and trees and moss, in addition to Velociraptor and Triceratops, I guess?
Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
You realize that vaccine hesitancy isn’t new and wasn’t a right wing thing? The right wing only has a disbelief about the covid vaccine and probably rightfully so. It went from: you can’t get it if youre vaccinated; okay you can get it but you can’t spread it; okay okay you can get it and spread but maybe the severity is reduced.
Measles was eliminated in the US by 2020. Texas had an outbreak last year with 2289 confirmed cases. They’re up to 2900 cases this year. The right-wing readily laps up all the misinformation it spews.
> Even Saudis couldn't have stopped them. That's not particularly American election issue
Energy prices are absolutely an American election issue. And Iranian proxies seizing the Bab-el Mandeb–and the U.S. being unable to help Saudi Arabia respond militarily while Iran cements control of the Strait of Hormuz–is the direct result of an American foreign policy choice to, once again, blunder into a war in the Middle East.
Uh... and Iran and the Straight of Hormuz?? Did you forget to mention that? Is that an election issue? And who funds the Houthis? And why would they want to close the straight to us? Is it something to do with supporting Israel? No? Ok.
There will probably be a lukewarm response, delaying a reckoning in either direction. That's what keeps happening. Though that's assuming the election results aren't nullified somehow.
How much land, time, and money, per citizen, would it take to put down enough solar cells to generate each person's basic electrical supply? Is it less than $5K?
It looks like solar can already power about a third of American household demand, and is on track to get to two thirds within five years [1]. (Commercial and utility is leading the acceleration, even into Q2 2026.)
That said, we're hitting 2030 with ~20% of American electricity coming from solar and wind versus 40 to 60% under the IRA baselines. We may wind up in a long-term spiral where our adversaries have not only more manufacturing capability and structurally lower labour costs, but structurally cheaper energy, too.
I looked into this living in Japan and tired of the electric bill after running AC 24/7 for three months when it's 35 degrees at 65% humidity.
$5500 in solar panels including a battery would be just enough to keep the AC on all summer, and that's being fairly high on the temperature, around 26.
So based on cost alone and not power draw, with the AC off you could comfortably power a fridge, PC, and water heater, I guess? But I'm talking out my ass here
I live in a 160m2 (1700 sqft) house in Northern Europe (54N). 10kWp of solar on my roof generates around 1/3 more than I consume over the year. Everything is electric, I don't have natural gas. I have a heat pump for heating and cooling (rarely gets above 30c here). If I had a battery April - September could all be local consumption (I pull around 5kWh from the grid each day).
The issue is winter: It gets down to -25c and there is very little sun (not that it would help due to snow on the panels). In January and February this year I generated a grand total of 5kWh :D
However my house is a new house, it's designed to modern building standards and has 30cm of PIR insulation in the walls and even more in the roof. There's just no way to properly renovate old buildings to be like that without basically rebuilding the whole thing. The actual cost of materials is not expensive though (for the west). In milder climates (UK I'm looking at you) there's really no reason all new houses cannot be net-zero.
I have done a grid based setup at my house in India and it cost us close to 3k for a 5kw setup with 4 acs. Planning for a complete off grid solution once the efficient panels like hjt and sodium cells become common place. Right now we have acid batteries and they are not very comfortable to handle.
Converting Sun to electricity to power a water heater is suboptimal. The water can be heated directly by the Sun. If you can put a water tank above the solar panel, you don't even need a pump.
From a purely efficiency standpoint, yes, but practically, electricity->heat is a lot cheaper to install. Plumbing is messy, and bolting on a water circulation system to a roof is harder than delivering more joules over the wires.
Electrical generation is largely separate from imported crude oil (what the article is about).
It takes a lot more than $5K to build a system that can replace a household's energy use. For 24 hour coverage you need substantial battery capacity, too.
To cover theoretical EV charging it gets even more expensive.
Prices continue to come down, but it still takes a lot to actually replace all of a household's energy usage with solar.
Our house is all-electric. We have a 60 panel, 24 kw array that would probably cover all of our needs if it weren't shaded in the afternoon, and we have a real winter here, so the heat pump runs hard, and we use a substantial amount of electricity. About 1250 square feet of panels in total. Equipment costs about $20k-$30k in the US, not including batteries or electrician install. The actual array was pretty easy to set up.
On the global market, you can get the equipment for much less, the same inverter is a fraction of the cost that the UL listed American company version costs, the panels are a good bit less. But in the US, this stuff gets marked up pretty hard.
If your main load is for summer A/C, with a mild winter, the generation and usage line up much better.
Such a shame the US didn't switch at least some of the fleet to electric years ago when it had a chance. Total stupidity. Even to this day my local MAGA town balks at solar panels and just laughs at people who install them. Reality will smack them in the face sooner or later. Right now they are blaming the democratic governor because they only provided a tiny bill credit to citizens to help reduce rates but totally ignoring how the Republican promised nothing.
You are assuming the supply of diesel goes to 0. Instead there is a reduction, not elimination and as a result, demand destruction will happen in the US just as its been happening for months outside the US. (This is partially what allowed us to avoid a crisis in March)
Trucks will stop delivering trash (ex. China dollar store crap, lower margin non food items and a billion other nonessential items). Food prices go up, people will do without less desserts or fancy foods but enough deliveries continue with the fuel saved that no one starves.
Now imagine if we replaced only 10% of diesel trucks with electric. Hell just focus on the short haul trucks. That unburned diesel could have helped buffer the remaining fleet.
Civilisations will end before all oils underground is completely extracted, obviously. Because the harder to extract will remain were it stands, and civilisations will turn attention to other forms of energy.
I can't read the article either, but my understanding of the various factors is this:
* Houthis have taken control of all of the Yemeni coastline along the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait (and an island in the middle of it), which gives them the ability to effectively interdict trade through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, just as Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
* Not that it matters that much, because the Saudi pipeline that lets it export crude via Yanbu, in the Red Sea, has been disabled, and current estimates suggest that the recovery time is in weeks-to-months. That's about 4-5mbpd of crude oil that's down for the near feature, or about 4% of global crude oil production.
* Now that the summer driving season is over, US refineries are starting to switch from summer blends to winter blends, and this is one of the periods that refineries go down for maintenance. So US refinery capacity is down.
* The supply shock has been mitigated for the past several months by drawing down reserves (note that reserves were relatively high when the war started). This includes both national strategic petroleum reserves, but also corporate reserves (e.g., tanks on-site at refineries). It seems some of these reserves are starting to hit effective 0.
* On top of this, Trump is making it more and more clear that he has no intention of actually doing anything to end to the crisis. For example, he's effectively said that he's not going to do anything before the midterm elections, two months away. Which means the market optimism that the war is going to be over, like, tomorrow is fading.
I’m guessing their solution is for us to be even more dependent upon oil?
The issue here is that we based our entire economy around a substance that is incredibly price-volatile, run by a cartel, and is plentiful mostly in places that are unstable or hostile to us. I think it’s crazy that we’ve completely normalized the idea that fuel needs to have prices listed outside a gas station because it changes so frequently. Imagine if supermarkets had to list the price of a loaf of bread outside because it kept changing so often.
And it’s really our own fault (or at least the fault of politicians bought by oil companies) because the dangers of oil dependence were obvious at least back in the 70s.
Braess's/Pigou's Paradox that more car lanes cause more traffic was found in the 1920's. We massively overbuilt for the car regardless and keep getting worse traffic to this day.
> Braess's/Pigou's Paradox that more car lanes cause more traffic was found in the 1920's.
The paradox is that it _can_ cause worse traffic, not that it always does. American cities are built like shit for transport, but it's not as simple as "roads too big, therefore traffic". Sprawl is a much bigger (and more difficult to do ~anything about) issue.
Faster CPUs cause people to run larger programs. Egad! Nobody needs more than 100 MHz! Ban FLOP inflation now before Big Silicon makes us burn any more electricity.
> and is plentiful mostly in places that are unstable or hostile to us.
Plentiful in places we keep making unstable and hostile to us by bombing.
Their solution is to drive demand for domestically-produced oil at ever increasing volumes and prices.
> guessing their solution is for us to be even more dependent upon oil?
They're competent enough to be able to model the demand destruction occuring globally.
In the meantime, given "Canada supplied the U.S. with more than 60 per cent of its crude oil imports last year," Canada's oil bonanza may not only make up for their tariff losses but actually put them into a net surplus [1].
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-oil-prices-trump-ira...
> run by a cartel, and is plentiful mostly in places that are unstable or hostile to us.
If by "we" you mean the United States, it's worth noting that the US is a net exporter of fuel products and our net imports of crude oil have dropped a lot.
> Imagine if supermarkets had to list the price of a loaf of bread outside because it kept changing so often.
This actually happens when prices become volatile. Not long ago I could see the prices of eggs posted outside different stores on my drive home.
It's all fracked up
If there isn’t an apt response in the midterms, we’re far beyond the point of return.
There is no apt response other than for the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation to all suddenly change their minds about gay frogs and space lasers and stolen elections. I can’t see it happening.
> There is no apt response other than for the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation
Single-digit percentage points of turnout changes would swing the House and Senate. Double-digit percentage changes in voter turnout, as in 15 to 30 percent of unlikely-to-vote registered voters turning out for Democrats in deep-red Republican stronghods like Alabama and Mississippi, gives Democrats a Congressional supermajority.
MAGA voters aren't dropping their identity for a while. Possibly never. Most voters who aren't registered or don't vote are lazy and nihilstic and worth ignoring. But a tenth should be pitchable. In a reach, a third of them could find motivation.
I'm excited to see all the nutty takes about oil prices from the same people who don't belive in vaccines.
I kinda hope they bring back the old idea that oil is actually formed out of non-biological matter and so that means its just basically infinitly seeping up from the earth, we just have to drill a bit deeper. But I think that's a little too nerdy for them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
When I was a kid in the 1980s, the scientific shows and authors all agreed that petroleum was made of dinosaurs. Triceratops and Brontosaurus had died ?? MYA and got compressed into the oil we're drilling for today.
It was only about 3 years ago when I learned that petroleum comes from almost anything organic. So, ferns and trees and moss, in addition to Velociraptor and Triceratops, I guess?
Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
You realize that vaccine hesitancy isn’t new and wasn’t a right wing thing? The right wing only has a disbelief about the covid vaccine and probably rightfully so. It went from: you can’t get it if youre vaccinated; okay you can get it but you can’t spread it; okay okay you can get it and spread but maybe the severity is reduced.
Measles was eliminated in the US by 2020. Texas had an outbreak last year with 2289 confirmed cases. They’re up to 2900 cases this year. The right-wing readily laps up all the misinformation it spews.
Houthis seized Bob-el Mandeb Strait. Even Saudis couldn't have stopped them. That's not particularly American election issue.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. That's not particularly American election issue.
> Even Saudis couldn't have stopped them. That's not particularly American election issue
Energy prices are absolutely an American election issue. And Iranian proxies seizing the Bab-el Mandeb–and the U.S. being unable to help Saudi Arabia respond militarily while Iran cements control of the Strait of Hormuz–is the direct result of an American foreign policy choice to, once again, blunder into a war in the Middle East.
Is it not clear that American election issues are directly related to those things?
Uh... and Iran and the Straight of Hormuz?? Did you forget to mention that? Is that an election issue? And who funds the Houthis? And why would they want to close the straight to us? Is it something to do with supporting Israel? No? Ok.
Even Russia would be better off today if we'd given Ukraine the tools to end the war two or three years ago.
Yeah, but the important question is where would Putin be after that?
There will probably be a lukewarm response, delaying a reckoning in either direction. That's what keeps happening. Though that's assuming the election results aren't nullified somehow.
I would not be shocked if nothing happens and pleasantly surprised if something does.
But I'm gonna get 5-large!!!
Right after you get that DOGE check.
How much land, time, and money, per citizen, would it take to put down enough solar cells to generate each person's basic electrical supply? Is it less than $5K?
It looks like solar can already power about a third of American household demand, and is on track to get to two thirds within five years [1]. (Commercial and utility is leading the acceleration, even into Q2 2026.)
That said, we're hitting 2030 with ~20% of American electricity coming from solar and wind versus 40 to 60% under the IRA baselines. We may wind up in a long-term spiral where our adversaries have not only more manufacturing capability and structurally lower labour costs, but structurally cheaper energy, too.
[1] https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/
I looked into this living in Japan and tired of the electric bill after running AC 24/7 for three months when it's 35 degrees at 65% humidity.
$5500 in solar panels including a battery would be just enough to keep the AC on all summer, and that's being fairly high on the temperature, around 26.
So based on cost alone and not power draw, with the AC off you could comfortably power a fridge, PC, and water heater, I guess? But I'm talking out my ass here
I live in a 160m2 (1700 sqft) house in Northern Europe (54N). 10kWp of solar on my roof generates around 1/3 more than I consume over the year. Everything is electric, I don't have natural gas. I have a heat pump for heating and cooling (rarely gets above 30c here). If I had a battery April - September could all be local consumption (I pull around 5kWh from the grid each day).
The issue is winter: It gets down to -25c and there is very little sun (not that it would help due to snow on the panels). In January and February this year I generated a grand total of 5kWh :D
However my house is a new house, it's designed to modern building standards and has 30cm of PIR insulation in the walls and even more in the roof. There's just no way to properly renovate old buildings to be like that without basically rebuilding the whole thing. The actual cost of materials is not expensive though (for the west). In milder climates (UK I'm looking at you) there's really no reason all new houses cannot be net-zero.
I have done a grid based setup at my house in India and it cost us close to 3k for a 5kw setup with 4 acs. Planning for a complete off grid solution once the efficient panels like hjt and sodium cells become common place. Right now we have acid batteries and they are not very comfortable to handle.
Converting Sun to electricity to power a water heater is suboptimal. The water can be heated directly by the Sun. If you can put a water tank above the solar panel, you don't even need a pump.
From a purely efficiency standpoint, yes, but practically, electricity->heat is a lot cheaper to install. Plumbing is messy, and bolting on a water circulation system to a roof is harder than delivering more joules over the wires.
If it powers a heat pump water heater, it's pretty efficient, and much less plumbing involved.
This is true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House...
It is also true that solar water heating has unpleasant failure modes.
Electrical generation is largely separate from imported crude oil (what the article is about).
It takes a lot more than $5K to build a system that can replace a household's energy use. For 24 hour coverage you need substantial battery capacity, too.
To cover theoretical EV charging it gets even more expensive.
Prices continue to come down, but it still takes a lot to actually replace all of a household's energy usage with solar.
Our house is all-electric. We have a 60 panel, 24 kw array that would probably cover all of our needs if it weren't shaded in the afternoon, and we have a real winter here, so the heat pump runs hard, and we use a substantial amount of electricity. About 1250 square feet of panels in total. Equipment costs about $20k-$30k in the US, not including batteries or electrician install. The actual array was pretty easy to set up.
On the global market, you can get the equipment for much less, the same inverter is a fraction of the cost that the UL listed American company version costs, the panels are a good bit less. But in the US, this stuff gets marked up pretty hard.
If your main load is for summer A/C, with a mild winter, the generation and usage line up much better.
only a tiny portion of per-individual energy needs are currently electric. roughly guess, 10% or less.
diesel is widely used for things like shipping and other supply chain stuff, so expect knock-on price impacts.
Such a shame the US didn't switch at least some of the fleet to electric years ago when it had a chance. Total stupidity. Even to this day my local MAGA town balks at solar panels and just laughs at people who install them. Reality will smack them in the face sooner or later. Right now they are blaming the democratic governor because they only provided a tiny bill credit to citizens to help reduce rates but totally ignoring how the Republican promised nothing.
trains. semi-trucks. international cargo ships. airplanes.
semi-trucks might be viable electrically, none of the other options currently are.
It's $(a lot) because only a tiny fraction of the population can live without goods delivered and produced by diesel fuel.
You are assuming the supply of diesel goes to 0. Instead there is a reduction, not elimination and as a result, demand destruction will happen in the US just as its been happening for months outside the US. (This is partially what allowed us to avoid a crisis in March)
Trucks will stop delivering trash (ex. China dollar store crap, lower margin non food items and a billion other nonessential items). Food prices go up, people will do without less desserts or fancy foods but enough deliveries continue with the fuel saved that no one starves.
Now imagine if we replaced only 10% of diesel trucks with electric. Hell just focus on the short haul trucks. That unburned diesel could have helped buffer the remaining fleet.
Diesel fuel at US$8.49 a gallon today. (Redwood City, California.)
Still cheaper than London, at £1.89/L
E10 petrol is £1.64/L, for ref.
The city with no redwoods?
That’s cos of California. It used to hit 7 couple of years back as well.
Wow, that climbed quite fast. But I guess it could keep on climbing if there's very little supply...
Yup. And my only car is a Ram 2500 crew cab with 6.7L Cummins diesel.
I live in the east bay and my trips to the ocean and Tahoe have dropped to zero.
Buy a guzzler get guzzled I guess?
wow how long for it to hit $10+
California Gas Station With $9.99 Diesel Exemplifies Fuel Crisis - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-12/californi... | https://archive.today/pLz0v - September 12th, 2026
US Sees Diesel Stocks Falling to 2003 Low Ahead of Peak Demand - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/us-sees-d... | https://archive.today/Dmnid - September 9th, 2026
Note that this in no way means the end of oil in the ground or being extracted. "Peak" never meant The Erlich-Simons "we've run out"
Civilisations will end before all oils underground is completely extracted, obviously. Because the harder to extract will remain were it stands, and civilisations will turn attention to other forms of energy.
Melvin from Office Space: I was told that gas prices would fall below $2/gallon.
paywalled in this economy, rek. someone hit me with the synopsis
I can't read the article either, but my understanding of the various factors is this:
* Houthis have taken control of all of the Yemeni coastline along the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait (and an island in the middle of it), which gives them the ability to effectively interdict trade through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, just as Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
* Not that it matters that much, because the Saudi pipeline that lets it export crude via Yanbu, in the Red Sea, has been disabled, and current estimates suggest that the recovery time is in weeks-to-months. That's about 4-5mbpd of crude oil that's down for the near feature, or about 4% of global crude oil production.
* Now that the summer driving season is over, US refineries are starting to switch from summer blends to winter blends, and this is one of the periods that refineries go down for maintenance. So US refinery capacity is down.
* The supply shock has been mitigated for the past several months by drawing down reserves (note that reserves were relatively high when the war started). This includes both national strategic petroleum reserves, but also corporate reserves (e.g., tanks on-site at refineries). It seems some of these reserves are starting to hit effective 0.
* On top of this, Trump is making it more and more clear that he has no intention of actually doing anything to end to the crisis. For example, he's effectively said that he's not going to do anything before the midterm elections, two months away. Which means the market optimism that the war is going to be over, like, tomorrow is fading.
maybe this?
https://wixx.com/2026/09/11/chevron-ceo-says-depleted-crude-...
Water wet too?
What is not wet. Water makes things wet.